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Box fresh: a warm-to-the-touch RealDoll in the San Diego factory, ready for shipment to a client. The dolls cost from $5,000. Photograph: Jonathan Becker/Contour by Getty Images
(The Guardian) The world is ending. The sports fields are empty, the science labs closed. No babies have been born for years. Cut to a split screen of human and robots kissing passionately. “They’re trapped!” says the narrator, voice like gravel. “Trapped in a soft, vice-like grip of robot lips.” Words slam against the screen, a warning. “Don’t. Date.Robots.”
ExceptFuturama’s 2001episode “I Dated a Robot”, with its post-apocalyptic world of silvers and blues, wildly overestimated how long it would take before this fear became flesh. It’s November 2015, and in Malaysia, where humidity is at 89% and it is almost certainly still raining, David Levy, a founder of the second annualCongress on Love and Sex with Robots, is free to talk on the phone – he is less busy than planned. “I never expected to end up here,” he says. I hear a shrug.
The Congress on Love and Sex with Robots was meant to begin on 16 November,but was deemed illegaldays after Levy arrived from London. “There’s nothing scientific about sex and robots,” inspector-general of police Khalid Abu Bakar told a press conference, explaining why. “It is an offence to have anal sex in Malaysia [let alone sex with robots].”
“I think they thought people would be having sex with robots or some strange thing like that,” Levy’s co-founder Adrian David Cheok said afterwards, explaining that they had planned a series of academic talks about humanoid robotics. But some strange thing like that, some strange thing like a human having sex with a robot, is what Levy, Cheok and others are predicting is almost our reality. They have seen the future of sex, they say, and it is teledildonic.
Teledildonic. The word rolls around the mouth like a Werther’s Original. While there are a variety of romantic tech-sex developments appearing weekly – from the ocean ofOculus Riftpossibilities to an invisible boyfriend who lives on your phone, each new development rich as aMiranda Julystory but as doom-laden as one of Margaret Atwood’s – it’s teledildonics that are exciting not just the porn industry, but scientists too. Long hyped as the new wave in erotic technology, these are smart sex toys connected to the internet. And while they started life as vibrators that could be operated remotely, today the term has expanded to loosely include the new generation of robotic sex dolls.
Cultural analystSherry Turklewarns we’re rapidly approaching a point where: “We may actually prefer the kinship of machines to relationships with real people and animals.” Certainly we have long had a fascination with these half-women, fromThe Bionic Womanin the 1970s toHerin 2013, where Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with his computer’s operating system. This year,Ex Machina’s Ava seduced, killed and killed again. In 2007 Ryan Gosling starred opposite a “RealDoll”, Bianca, in the indie romanceLars and the Real Girl. The film ends with him gently drowning her in a lake.
A recent study by Stanford University says people may experience feelings of intimacy towards technology because “our brains aren’t necessarily hardwired for life in the 21st century”. Hence, perhaps, the speed at which relationships with robots are becoming a reality.
Today the RealDoll team, infamous now for its lifelike sex dolls (of which they claim to have sold more than 5,000), is extending its range to develop an artificial intelligence system capable both of following commands and talking back to its user. A Realbotix head (reports theNew York Times) which can be attached to the existing RealDoll body will cost around $10,000, and will be available in 2017. In a piece entitled“Is This the Dawn of the Sexbots?”, the company’s owner David Mills explained the appeal of these warm-to- the-touch dolls, tellingVanity Fairhe loves women but “doesn’t really like to be around people”.
“Women have enjoyed sex toys for 50 years,” he said (after introducing his first model, which arrived at his home in what looks like a customised coffin, head not yet attached), “but men are still stigmatised. We have to correct that. I want to be the Rosa Parks of sex dolls. Men are not going to sit in the back of the bus any more.”
Pinky and perky: an assortment of nipple choices that customers can order from RealDoll. Photograph: Jonathan Becker/Contour by Getty Images
The people leading us into the future of sex had other lives before (RealDoll’s Mills, for instance, is best known for the bookAtheist Universe, which Richard Dawkins cites as “admirable work”). David Levy is a British international master of chess. With his white hair and a sharp eyebrow, he has the look of a cynical Einstein. It was chess that led Levy to computing, consulting in the late 1970s on the development of a chess module for home computers. In 1997, and again in 2009, he won the covetedLoebner prize, which awards the programme that is best able to simulate human communication.
“What do you do when you’re not doing the Loebner prize?” asked Judge 3 to Levy’s chatbot, Do-Much-More (the offspring of his first winner Do-A-Lot). “Oh, I do much more than I intended to do at first. I got more interested in the job as I went along.” Judge 3: “Is that difficult?” Do-Much-More: “No, it isn’t at all difficult. It is as peaceful as a platypus playing with a potato pudding.”
In 2007 Levy publishedLove and Sex with Robots, a book that oneUSA Todaycritic found “troublingly arousing”. Just as same-sex love and marriage have finally been embraced by society, he argued, so will sex with robots. “Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans,” he wrote. The dream is, as one would expect, utopian. Prostitution will become obsolete. Artificial intelligence will be the answer to many of the world’s problems with intimacy. “The number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practised between humans will be extended, as robots teach us more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.”
Levy predicted “a huge demand from people who have a void in their lives because they have no one to love, and no one who loves them. The world will be a much happier place because all those people who are now miserable will suddenly have someone. I think that will be a terrific service to mankind.”
Unless… Unless… One chilly night in February I was chilled further byThe Netherby American playwright Jennifer Haley. The story is set in a dystopian future in which people, so disillusioned by real life, decide to abandon it altogether, “crossing over” to spend all their time online in virtual worlds such as The Hideaway. Here, protecting their anonymity by living as avatars, they are able to do whatever they want. They rape children. The online world is sunlit and quaint, with a jolly host called Papa, who, when they enter, offers his guests a little girl. After they’ve had sex with her, they are invited to slay her with an axe. There are “no consequences here”, assures Papa.
And in this play is one of the questions that arises when we stare into the near-future of sex, with its machines and its promises, its employment of the technology used for shoot-’em-up games now reinvented for fucking. Porn actor Ela Darling, when asked byVicein a discussion about tech and sex: “What would you do if someone fully scanned you and could do whatever they wanted with you?” answered: “That’s probably the future. And that’s OK with me.” Is it a robot’s role to do the things that humans can’t, or won’t? Will they be the solution not just to the problem Levy discusses, of loneliness, but to the problem of people whose desires are illegal? And then what does this mean for the rest of us?
Robots are evolving fast. They were invented in Bristol in 1949 by William Grey Walter, who was investigating how the brain works. It is fitting then, that down a wooded slope on the University of the West of England campus,the Bristol Robotics Laboratoryis today considered a world leader in its field. The lab covers an area of 3,500m2, its vast yellow-lit space divided into glass sections littered with hard drives and disembodied prosthetic limbs. In the centre is a house. This is their“assisted living” smart home, where researchers are testing systems that could help people with dementia and limited mobility. By the sofa is a “sociobot” that can respond to facial expressions. The most human-looking of the systems, over by the dining table, is a robot called Molly. She has a tablet in place of a chest, for displaying photographs, and “She’ll say, for instance,” my guide explains: “‘Do you remember Paris?’” In that echoing space I found myself suddenly breathless.
Face off: Ava in the film Ex Machina. Photograph: Rex
When David Levy was 10 he visited Madame Tussauds waxworks museum with his aunt. “I saw someone,” he said, “and it didn’t dawn on me for a few seconds that that person was a waxwork. It had a profound effect on me – that not everything is as it seems, and that simulations can be very convincing.”
Levy has rarely left the air-conditioned confines of his lab since he arrived in Malaysia. There are no windows. The door leads on to the forecourt of a small shopping mall, and next door, looming yellowly beside the river that marks the border with Singapore, is Legoland. On Google Maps it looks as though a giant child has discarded a toy on her way in for tea. In his lab Levy is working on the new Do-Much-More, a chatbot that, he says, after two weeks is already better than last year’s Loebner winner. “When you have a robot around the home,” he tells me, “whether for cooking or for sex, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have a chat with it?”
Levy has very little time for jokes. Or, it turns out, for philosophy. “Are humans machines?” I ask him. He tells me he’s learned not to try to answer philosophical questions. Ethics, however, he’s interested in. “People ask: is it cheating? Only if women using vibrators are cheating. Will sex workers be put out of business? It’s possible.” What about bigger issues though – what about sex and empathy? And: can a robot consent? “When AI advances, robots will exhibit empathy. People will feel towards them as they do towards animals.”
