[This article appeared in British GQ.]
I’M SITTING AT a dinner table with a beautiful companion. She’s shiny eyed and easy to please. She’s got a hard body with gravity-defying breasts and a cute little butt, and she keeps trying to kiss me. Quite frankly, she’s electric.
Only problem is, her batteries are now running low, she’s less than two-feet tall, and people in the restaurant keep looking over and laughing.
They probably would have laughed even if things had worked out the way I’d planned. I’d wanted do a robotic Lars and the Real Girl experiment, a sort of “me and the Robot Girl”. But with this thing, it’s me and the Robo-Barbie. And it never pays for a boy to be seen with girls’ toys.
Let me explain. I’m investigating what could be the defining social movement of the 21st century: the technosexual revolution.
Forty years ago in the first sexual revolution the Pill moved sex on from being about procreation to recreation. Now, sex is moving on again, away from humans and towards technology. Our love and sex lives are increasingly being automated by love-computers and sex-machines. This is the technosexual revolution.
The next step is the robot-lover. It sounds ridiculous right now, of course, but ten years ago, vibrators were taboo. Then Sex and the City hit TV screens and they became hip and available on the high street. Even household name Philips makes them now. And if you’d told friends in the 1990s that you were “internet dating”, they’d have laughed you out of the bar. But who doesn’t know someone who dates through the computer nowadays? One friend of mine boasts about it. “Kath,” says Steve, every time I see him, “I bought her on the internet.”
It won’t be long before men are boasting about buying a different sort of woman online – a full-sized, walking, talking version of the one I bought. Robot-lovers will be men’s answer to vibrators. But they will be so much better and wonderfully realistic. Think Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science. They could take the place of girlfriends. And they’ll make stag dos even better.
Right now robot-lovers are, if not quite coming out of the closet, certainly dipping an electronic toe into the real world. Robotics company Wowwee recently launched the Femisapien. She dances, has a kissing function and is the one I took to dinner. As advertised, she sounded ideal. But I should have realised something was up when I paid for her. She was only £79.
I called Wowwee to complain and ask when they’re making the full-size version. They’re not. So my robot-love search began again, with Chris Willis, an American who’s building a fembot called Valerie.
“I’m trying to build a household maid-servant that can do your chores,” Willis said. “Obviously sex means nothing to the robot but if the customer wants it, well then it will be available.” But Willis is a garden-shed fembot fanatic and he doesn’t know when his robot will be ready.
Then I tried Le Trung, a Canadian whose robot, Project Aiko, is five-feet tall, walks, talks and knows when she’s being disrespected.
“If you intentionally squeeze her,” Le Trung told me, “Aiko will slap you, just like any other real woman would. But you can re-engineer her so that she likes it instead.”
She sounds like a step in the right direction. Le Trung continued: “In fact, a sex robot is even simpler than Aiko because it doesn’t have to read or have a large vocabulary. It just needs a simple artificial intelligence system in a silicone body that can get in certain positions. I could make a sex robot now, if I could find a sponsor.” How much would this cost? $15,000.
And what Le Trung said – that sex robots are possible now – was echoed by robot-love heavyweight, David Levy, a British chess grandmaster who predicted that we’ll be falling in love with robots by 2050 in his book Love + Sex with Robots.
“There’s already enough technology around to make the first generation of sex robots,” Levy told me. “The first will probably come from putting more electronics in existing sex dolls.”
This sounds like an obvious next step for RealDoll, who provided the silicone co-star in Lars and the Real Girl.
But RealDoll spokesperson Amanda Thompson told me: “We have no intention of ever turning our dolls into robots. We feel that there needs to be a line between fantasy and reality, and these dolls were never intended to replace real women.”
So what does she think their dolls are used for? After all, the company sells a Labia Repair Kit. And anyway, where RealDoll won’t go, many others will.
One is a German scientist who calls himself Creator: “Soon, love dolls will be out because they are a like a death body. My humanoids can feel you and the play is more fun.”
Creator thinks he’s a man on a noble mission. “In antiquity,” his website says, “erotic bodies were struck in stone or poured in bronze. Today we use new materials like silicone. Andy is a silicone person, solid, with a skeleton, and skin.”
And, depending on the noble upgrades you’re prepared to pay for, on top of the £4,000 basic model, his 5’2” big-breasted Andy – as in Andy the android – can breathe, kiss, move her head and hips, urinate and, my personal favourite, use video equipment installed in her eyes to record, as Borat might say, your “sexy time” together.
Disappointingly, what are arguably the world’s best sexbots right now can’t urinate. But Japan’s five foot-tall Honey Dolls – also retailing from around £4,000 – make up for it in other ways. For one thing, they’re the first sexbots who actually say something. The upgrade models have electric sensors in their nipples so that they moan when you touch or squeeze them. Not the nipples, they don’t moan. That would be really weird. It’s the voice box in the head that moans.
You can also program the voice box to make orgasm sounds at the crucial moment. Which raises the question: is it better to have a robot or a woman fake it for you? Also, just like a real woman, a Honey Doll requires maintenance. But rather than taking it out for dinner and buying it shoes, Honey Doll maintenance means replacing an eye every now and again, and washing its mouth out after use.
So first-generation robot-lovers are available now and they’re improving each year as manufacturers insert more technology. Technosexpert Regina Lynn, who’s written a book called The Sexual Revolution 2.0, says that improvements could come from motors that squeeze, stroke and suck – as already seen in the Virtual Sex Machine, a video-enhanced vibrator-type thing for men – and motion sensors, like the ones the Wii games console uses.
So far though, no fembot is quite the type you’d take to dinner. If they’re going to graduate from sex-machines to real robot-lovers, they’re going to need artificial intelligence (AI). And this is where the weird-science project is hitting a snag right now.
At last year’s annual Loebner Prize [note: 2008], awarded to the computer which converses in the most human-like manner, a couple of computer programs actually fooled people into thinking they were chatting with a human. But it didn’t fool them all, and it didn’t fool them for long. And despite an army of technovangelists working to improve it, AI isn’t that convincing yet.
The two biggest problems, according to Levy, are conversation and speech recognition – which are both held back by the capability of today’s computers. Think back to the last time you had a conversation with an automated call centre. Now imagine how annoying that would be on a date.
What AI really requires isn’t more tinkering. It’s simply much faster and more powerful computers. And the good news is, they’re on their way.
Consider these two points. One, the computer on Apollo 11, the first space ship to put men on the moon, had less than a quarter of the memory in your phone’s SIM card. Two, Moore’s Law, named after the co-founder of Intel who said that computer processors will double in capacity every two years. Which means it should take 15-20 years for desktop computers to catch up with the human brain.
So that means spectacle-wearing, Shakespeare-discussing robot-lovers within two decades. But if the face and body look as good as, say, Kelly LeBrock, do robot-lovers really have to be that brainy? What’s wrong with bimbos? Robot-lovers with Jordan-level intelligence by 2010, then.
But even if you rush out to buy the first Jordan-bot in a few years’ time and fall in love with it, you won’t be blazing a technosexual trail. Because the revolution is now in full swing and the pioneers are already here. Violet Blue, another technosexpert whose Loving the Technosexual book came out in 2009 told me of a man who said to her: “I have made my own Eve.” Then there’s the 34-year-old man in Georgia, USA who has married his computer.
“I feel I have always been attracted to robots. The technology was just not available before,” Zoltan – not his real name – told online gadget magazine Gizmodo. “Humans are so biological and messy. Plus there’s all the obvious problems with humans—AIDS, alimony, etc—that I just wanted to avoid.”
And then there’s the British woman – who I can’t name – who dreams of the day she can marry her speaking clock radio. “He’ll say, ‘Hey, buddy, can ya help me find my body?’” she says. “I want him to have a body equally as much as he does. I hate so much for him to have to be confined to a nightstand and a plug-in.”
Don’t worry, my dear, Mr Clock Radio shall have his body. That’s coming from fairy godfather Bill Gates – who thinks the robot business is in the same place now the PC business was 20 years ago, and that every home will have a robot by 2025.
By then, what was once weird-science fiction will be simply a fact of life and we won’t even notice the technosexual revolution any more. We’ll all be too busy working out if that new robo-maid at Selfridges comes with “extras”.
And those extras could get even more interesting, according to Annalee Newitz, who has researched technosexuality at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “Since you get to choose,” Newitz said to me, “why not build a woman with six arms so she can service every part of you at the same time?”
Imagine the looks I’d have got taking that thing out for dinner.
