‘She cooks as good as she looks, Ted,” says Walter Eberhart in the 1975
movie The Stepford Wives, marvelling at the robot replacement for Ted’s
human spouse. In Blade Runner in 1982 Harrison Ford simply terminates the
pleasure replicant Zhora but ends up running off with another robot –
Rachael. The movies have always been big on sexbots, but now they’re coming
to the real world.
Visit the websites of Honey Dolls and Real Doll – probably not safe to do this
at work – and you will be startled by two things. First, there is the
profound difference between Japanese and American ideals of sexiness – Honey
is Japanese, Real is American. And, second, you will be impressed by the
progress we have made in constructing artificial lovers.
Recently, Honey Dolls has even added sensors to its dolls’ nipples. The dolls
moan enticingly when they are touched.
“That’s the first example of the kind of thing I am talking about,” says David
Levy excitedly.
“There are quite a few technologies around that could be integrated into these
upmarket sex dolls.”
We are at the beginning, Levy believes, of a process that will lead us in
about 2050 to the widespread availability of robot lovers and carers:
machines that will look, act and talk like humans. Levy’s new book – Love
and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships – is the
road map to that eerie future. It is an unsensational work, a rounded
cultural, historical and technological survey of why robosex is the way of
the future. In its academic form – Intimate Relationships with Artificial
Partners – it earned him a PhD in Holland.
Can human relationships survive robot love gods/goddesses? And who are these
robots anyway? Do they have rights? Will they, in a relationship, have
emotional needs that we must respect?
I find myself discussing all this with Levy, 63, in his modest flat in
Hampstead, where he lives with two cats and his wife Christine. At least at
first, he thinks, the primary function of the machines will be to satisfy
the needs of the sexually deprived.
“There must be a huge number of people who may have social problems or be shy
or have psychosexual hang-ups . . . people who are lonely and miserable and
don’t have a normal sex life . . . I don’t see anything wrong with it if the
kind of robot I am talking about brings more pleasure to society. That’s a
good thing.”
He speaks methodically – not surprising, considering his background. Having
learnt chess at the age of eight, he went on to become an international
master. At university, he studied computer science and met Donald Michie,
who had worked on code-cracking during the war with the great mathematician
Alan Turing and then became the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI)
research in Britain.
Levy subsequently wrote more than 30 books on chess and worked on computer
chess programs. In 1968 he challenged AI researchers to beat him at chess;
he wasn’t defeated until 1989 (by Deep Thought). In 1997 he won the Loebner
prize for a program that simulated human speech.
Now president of the International Computer Games Association, Levy has a
small company called Intelligent Toys, which is working on talking dolls,
and runs his own computing consultancy. Since Love and Sex with Robots came
out in America, he has found himself on the world chat circuit. This has
included a long, serious spot on the Arab answer to CNN, Al-Jazeera.
The book formed in his mind when he read The Second Self, by Sherry Turkle, a
leading commentator on the virtual world. In it she had mentioned a
Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who had tried to have
girlfriends but preferred relationships with computers. “I thought if
someone who is a student at MIT – and therefore highly intelligent – could
feel this way, there must be a huge number of people who feel the same,”
Levy says.
Leaving aside the social and ethical implications, the most obvious objection
to his sexbots is that they need at least to behave intelligently if they
are to work as lovers. Yet, since AI began in the 1950s, its progress has
been deeply unspectacular.
“You’re right. But when you have far more computing power, new techniques will
suggest themselves that weren’t possible with the old technology.”
Faster chips and larger memories will mean that, by 2050, computers and robots
will be able to engage in convincing conversations. This may not mean they
are conscious like us, possessed of an inner life – but that, says Levy,
doesn’t matter. If they appear to be conscious then we must – shall – assume
they are.
But wouldn’t knowing that they were just behaving, rather than thinking, take
the fun out of a robot love affair? “I have a debate with my wife over this.
She says [a robot] doesn’t have a soul or consciousness, so how can it be
creative? My argument is if you went to the Festival Hall and were
blindfolded, and then heard the most fantastic performance on the piano
you’d ever heard, and then removed the blindfold to see there was just an
object the size of a matchbox on the stage, does that diminish the joy we
had when we experienced the music? I say it wouldn’t.”
In other words, great music is great music and great sex is great sex. Why
bring consciousness or the soul into it?
Pets, vibrators and prostitution support his case. We have no evidence of any
inner life or consciousness in our pets, but they behave in ways that
convince us they have – whereas, in fact, these behaviours have been bred
into them over generations. It is enough: people fall in love with their
pets.
Machine sex is already in the mass market – vibrators are commonplace.
Finally, prostitution – its true scale is unknown, but we can assume it is a
far bigger business than anybody admits – shows that sexual expertise that
may involve the pretence of affection floats many boats.
It is the market, of course, that will drive the creation of sexbots. Levy
says that the “adult entertainment” industry, worth $57 billion (£28.6
billion) a year worldwide, is already beginning to lead the way. In Japan
sex dolls are known as “Dutch wives” – and one escort agency has started
using them instead of real women, sending them round to hotel rooms for an
hour at a time. In Korea there is a hotel that provides them with every room.
“The industry is going to realise the value of putting electronics into these
dolls. It may push the cost up from the $5,000-$10,000 range to
$15,000-$20,000. But once that happens – once you have some vibrating parts,
sensors for when you caress the erogenous zones, speech to tell the guy what
a wonderful lover he is – I think the market will expand very rapidly.”
Perhaps, darling, we need to talk.
Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, by
David Levy, is published by Duckworth at £12.99
www.bryanappleyard.com
