Phos

I think they want to! They just struggle to find it, or struggle to deal with the mishmash of expectations and standards and hangups they have long enough to make something work with another person.

I heard a thing which I have no source for and may be apocryphal, but which makes sense to me: Before you could reliably record someone, video and voice, people were going around saying that once we achieved that, we could preserve someone even after they had died. After all, you could hear them, you could see them, it would be just like they were alive.

It's the kind of thing that only makes sense when you -aren't- used to how stale and repetitive the same recording becomes, how flat it eventually seems, and how there's a huge difference between watching someone and interacting with them. That all feels incredibly obvious to us now, but only because we've lived with that technology around us all our lives!

The search for robot RP partners feels a bit like that. People think they want the text, the horny ideas, the post-masturbation glow. But they don't, they want the human connection that underlies it, and it's only when they actually get to experience one without the other that they'll realize what the difference is.