Who chooses fake furries over actual sex?

In “Identity in the Age of the Internet,” “Doug” is a college aged man with multiple online identities. The one that stood out to me was the furry. Perhaps I’m a bit biased; furries freak me out more than I care to say (for those who don’t know what a furry is… some people like anthropomorphic cartoon-type animals… really like them). But the idea of this MUD, especially Doug’s role in it, seems fundamentally disturbing to me. Doug says that he doesn’t say a whole lot- he mostly watches, and he feels like he’s a “sexual tourist” (actual sexual tourists are people, often pedophiles, who travel abroad for inexpensive and exotic sex trades, but that’s beside the point). This is so many levels removed from actual sex with another human being that I’m afraid for the species. If people can find such isolating sexual practices arousing, what hope is there for breeding? Yes, sure, natural selection has always targeted gamers (you can either give your kids a talk on safe sex or a D&D manual), but I genuinely worry about a culture that chooses pretend pretend sex over the pursuit of real sex. And this isolation is reflected in all relationships, not just sex. Most people have at least a few friendships that are exclusively online, sometimes even with people they’ve never met. Doug is in no way exceptional. He reflects what appears to me to be a trend towards cold, alienating computer relationships over genuine human connections.

In what ways have computers damaged the quality of human interaction?

What is human?

In “What’s It Mean to Be Human, Anyway?,” Charles Platt describes the Alan Turring’s idea that if a computer can successfully imitate a human being during what basically amounts to a conversation, it should be practically considered a human. This, of course, was in 1950 and, judging by old episodes of The Twilight Zone, people were a bit more hopeful about the capabilities of computers back then. And, of course, no computer has come close to matching the human characteristics of Asimov’s Multivac. However, in an apparent attempt to encourage humanistic robot technology, Hugh Loebner, of inflatable disco floor fame, began hosting a competition for programmers to make their machines imitate humans. (Maybe he wants a technological utopia, maybe he wants sexbots. No one knows for sure.)
The participants seemed to have a common strategy: have enough preprogrammed responses to prepare for every potential question. No analysis, no thought, just a set answer based on a few textual cues. I wouldn’t quite call that imitating human life. And many of the critics of Loebner’s contest agree with me. A researcher mentioned in the article claimed his contest favored cheap tricks over the development of real artificial intelligence.
It would appear that the Turring test is flawed; these machines don’t imitate anything. They just spit out answers to what their programmers thought were likely questions. Important to note is that the winner wasn’t designed for this competition at all; it was meant to be an encyclopedia style computer for dispensing sex advice to shy Canadians. That’s all these machines are- user-friendly encyclopedias. They don’t imitate life, they store and dispense our knowledge. We’ve all, at least once, said “excuse me” after bumping into a store mannequin. We get confused and think it’s a human. It tricks us. Would we ever suggest that, for all practical purposes, we consider it to be a human being? Similarly, would anyone for a minute suggest that someone severely catatonic is not a human being?

If the Turring test is a flawed way to determine whether or not a computer is worthy of consideration as a human being, by what method can we determine the humanness of a computer? For that matter, what do we use to determine the humanness of a human?