"Is Sex with Robots Possible?" - Headline from msn.com

(quotes pulled from here)

Thanks MSN, I myself have spent many a lonely night between exhausted sobs that leave me shaking in that oh-so-cliched fetal coil, wondering aloud and sometimes while shaking my fists toward God, "When can I fuck me some robots?"

Artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands (how cold and lonely must it be there?) ...conjectures that robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them, have sex with them and even marry them.

Sex? Okay, understandable I suppose. Love? Hmm, questionable. But marriage? Why marry them when you can just have such uncomplicated, no-strings-attached sex? Does sanctifying the relationship in the eyes of government and God become important with a robot? Would you want to be legally entitled to leave your possessions to your robot widow/widower? Or does marriage indicate that the relationship would go beyond sex? Would this robot do my laundry? Clip my toenails while I lean back luxuriously in my recliner and watch Nascar? Provide moral support while I attempt advancements at my place of employment?

Here's the quote where I realized Mr. Levy might not be well:

It may sound a little weird, but it isn't. Love and sex with robots are inevitable.

It isn't weird? And it's inevitable? Love? With a robot?


In 2006, Henrik Christensen, founder of the European Robotics Research Network, predicted that people will be having sex with robots within five years, and Levy thinks that's quite likely.

Hmm, I was feeling pretty lonely lately, wondering how long it's gonna be til' these burly ol' arms of mine could spoon with someone again, and uuhhh, looks like it's gonna be five years.


Serious and not so serious questions are raised by this whole robot sex business. I'll make no effort to separate the two. And honestly, seeing as how I can't wrap my mind around this, this entire blog entry is pretty shoddily organized. It's just that this idea seems to be ripe with so many questions, and it makes one reconsider ideas of humanity and love.

What about divorce? Will we have a bevy of used, unwanted robot partners rebuked after "the thrill is gone," frequenting singles bars, making drunken, dancing-on-top-of-the-bar robot asses of themselves and going home with the last person there? Will people even want to be with divorced robots, or will they simply need to be disposed of?


Will we drunk-dial our robot exes?


I did find this next part funny and more revealing of Levy himself than the question of robot sex/love/marriage:

At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, "but once you have a story like 'I had sex with a robot, and it was great!' appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I'd expect many people to jump on the bandwagon," Levy said.


Wow, sadly, I can see magazines of the future with headlines like that. Although I don't think geeky is necessarily the correct word choice there. I'd lean more toward, oh I don't know, indicative of a serious personal and social disorder.


Here's something President Eisenhower never coulda thunk:
We must beware the robot-industrial-congressional complex.

That's right. Congress legislating favors for corporate robot interests because they themselves will be entangled in this whole robot romance tomfoolery. If Republican sex scandals involved robots, would they still be as scandalous? Hell, if anything seems "inevitable," it's that in the future a Republican that vehemently castigates robot sex and marriage will be found in a bathroom stall with this thing:




Jesus, maybe this is what O'Reilly and anti-gay marriage folks mean when they say legalizing such marriages is a slippery slope to people marrying animals, marrying toaster ovens, boxes of delicious maple brown sugar mini-wheats, k-y warming gel, etc., all leading to marrying a damn robot.


In regard to the title of the link on msn.com - is sex with robots possible? - isn't the answer obviously yes? I mean, it seems like desperate and/or disturbed people could find a way to fuck just about anything - man, woman, child, animal, mineral or vegetable.


Some robots:

Jesus Christ, this robot saves wounded soldiers from battle! That's hot! What Republican wouldn't reconsider some legislation that would make it legal to honor this troop-honoring piece of hunkmetal?



Hmmm....

Obviously, one couldn't go much beyond second base with this robot. Or is it third? I never really understood the baseball analogy.


This robot's nice and all, but I think we're better off just staying friends.



And of course, what lady or alternative-leaning gentleman could deny a robotic James Spader head? (I'll avoid an obvious joke here)




Other thoughts:

Would you have to do your own maintenance?

That seems difficult. I just want to have sex with the robot, not perform routine maintenance. Then again, this would just provide a great capitalistic opportunity for robot repairmen! Neat! But also, and perhaps I'm veering into cringe-land, but would the robot take the time to, ahem cough cough, clean herself up afterward? That would seem like a sanitary necessity.


Would your robot be true to you? Hell, I'm so lacking in an ability to trust that I'd think my robot was fucking the fridge while I was at work. And in more complex issues, if fidelity is a matter of programming, could a pervert hacker reprogram your robot to cheat on you? If so, would you blame the robot? Would you know?


But back to the issue of love -
Levy argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, "and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that's programmable too."

The personality and knowledge thing, I hesitatingly admit, may have some merit. But that last thing - knowing they like you. Wouldn't knowing that they like you because you programmed them that way sort of kill that inexplicable butterfly nonsense and perhaps necessary human drama of not knowing? Programming it to like you just seems, I don't know, to eliminate something important that I can't quite explain. Maybe calling it cold is the simplest way of putting it.

Shit, but maybe the "similarities in personality and knowledge" being programmable is not a reasonable argument either. From what I understand, most people don't really know what they want, and most relationships and love are surprises. So I don't think one could begin to accurately program what they wanted because they don't know what they actually click (for lack of a better term) with anyway. When it comes to personality, I don't know if we do in fact seek similarities. Maybe knowledge and interests, but most relationships consist of two people with quite different personalities. I know I couldn't get along with somebody just like me. It's more of a strange symbiotic and yin and yang thing most of the time, not similarities that create a relationship scenario.

But all this talk of the future is really ridiculous, because tons of realistic love dolls already exist. Is this what you want to wake up to for the rest of your life?


From siliconeworksdolls.com:

Throat on this doll is 8” deep.

Jesus, would someone that gifted in the pants really need to resort to that?

We carry several types of realistic silicone sex dolls as well as doll torsos, breasts only, feet and heads. (silicone doll heads do not come with wig) from different manufacturers.

I can't help but think this is the extreme result of objectifying women (hmm, people in general I suppose, women just more commonly and farther back in our history) and breaking them down into their single body parts, be it from pornography, or even in mainstream advertising and entertainment.

I'll spare you the photo on this next caption:
Click photo to BUY or learn more about the torsos Natalie Petite Personal Companion love doll- Torso with attached head only, no bulky arms or legs. 36 C breasts Realistic and jiggly!

Ha! No bulky arms or legs.

Or bulky little brain with silly little words and thoughts.




But more love...

I'm familiar with the idea that we may not actually fall in love with a person, but rather the idea or image we have inside our brains of that person. We fall in love with a particular feeling or set of feelings that a person gives us, almost like an addiction to a certain behavioral pattern. Thus, when one person attempts or begins to change, or acts in ways outside of our fixed notion (humans are, after all, inclined at most turns to form concrete patterns out of the abstractions of life, usually just to get by) of said person, there are relationship problems.

So, perhaps a robot, forever unchanging and actually programmed to never change, is what some people really need? Still, there is the issue of not knowing what we want or need, and that thus any attempts to create an unchanging version of a romantic, idealized guess would ultimately disappoint us.


What are your thoughts on this?