Love and Sex with Robots

an extract from Electric Dreams

I am currently on holiday*, so today’s post is something I’ve already written—in fact, it’s an extract from my forthcoming book Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism, which will be published next month, on March 21st.

Those who know me know I’ve been writing this, in one form or another, since about 2016, when I read a book called Love and Sex with Robots, by a man called David Levy. Since then, the media madness around sex robots has only gotten weirder and more unhinged, and our relationship to tech entrepreneurs only more obsessive. In the book, I look at the concept of sex robots through five different lenses, to cut through both the hype and the knee-jerk reactions to them and instead find out what their promised existence says about us.

What follows is just a short extract, but if it piques your interest, you can pre-order Electric Dreams directly from the publisher here. 404 Ink is an Edinburgh-based indie publisher and the series that this book is a part of—the Inklings—is well worth your attention. My favourites are BFFs by Anahit Behrooz, The End by Katie Goh and The Appendix by Liam Konemann. Treat yourself to a pocket-sized read, and support a small publisher at the same time.

*I was going to write I am currently on holiday having a wonderful time but, given my luck, I know that I’m more likely to be having an experience in line with any of the following episodes from my recent history: having to go to the UK embassy in Cuba because we were trapped with no money, getting two different types of food poisoning within four days in Ghana, not getting off the ferry on time and ending up on the wrong island in Greece with someone else’s dog.

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The media hype around robots is almost entirely reserved for the (presumed) existence, forthcoming or current, of humanoid machines. It’s difficult to imagine a video of a Roomba, or robot from a car factory, or an industrial robot going viral today; the novelty has long since worn off. As Professor Adam Stokes at the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics explains:

what we expect robots to do is fed from a basis of science fiction. Robots as agents are around us all the time. Robots as embodied systems have a range of uses but they're not that interesting to the general public.^[1]

One notable exception to this is a robot artwork by controversy-courting Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, entitled Can’t Help Myself (2016-19), which was commissioned for installation at the Guggenheim Museum. An industrial robot arm was positioned in the middle of a glass box, with a puddle of deep red liquid around it. The robot’s task was to keep the liquid within a pre-programmed circular area around it; if the liquid seeped out of this area, the robotic arm turned and swept the liquid back towards the middle of the circle. The process of this Sisyphean task eventually splattered the insides of the glass box with the blood-like liquid, evoking a scene of real horror. The artists intended this to be a critique of the increasing role of technology in closing borders and criminalising migrants; as curator and writer Xiaoyu Weng writes for the official Guggenheim description of the artwork, 'bloodstain-like marks that accumulate around [the robotic arm] evoke the violence that results from surveilling and guarding border zone'.^[2] This intended meaning was completely drowned out when a video of the machine went viral after its appearance at the 2019 Venice Biennale. In the years since its creation, the robotic arm had slowed, and the inside of the glass box was stained by three years’ worth of the vicious red liquid. Without the context of the show, social media users immediately and intensely personified the robot, claiming that it was leaking the red liquid and desperately trying to contain it to keep itself running, and that it had once been free to dance, but now was too tired, too worn down to do so. Many claimed they had never been so moved by a work of art. To some extent, the artists did court this anthropomorphism; there’s something Xenomorphic about the design of the robot, and it was programmed with movements known as ‘ass shake' and 'scratch an itch'. But no matter how it moves, the artwork is simply an industrial robotics arm, and is not intended to convey emotion; the whole point is that it is an inhuman thing, performing an inhuman act. Still, we project onto it.

What this shows is that, no matter how nakedly mechanical a robot, nor how un-humanlike it looks, we simply cannot get away from that idea that robots have—or perhaps will have—some sort of humanity. In fact, the first piece of popular media to address the concept of artificial, human-created people (which introduced the term robot to the English language) also popularised the idea that they would, in some way, be just like us. Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots told the story of roboti, a race of workers created from synthetic material, who eventually rise up against their human oppressors and cause their destruction. This might have been the first story of machines developing human-like mental abilities and emotions—in this instance, rage at the injustice of their treatment, and an ability to organise against those who do them harm—but it would certainly not be the last. Countless books, films, plays and artworks on the topic of robots have been created in the century since then, and in the vast majority of them, the robots develop humanistic consciousness. We take this as almost inevitable.

This is a quite logical extension of how we, as humans, deal with the problem of other people generally. As beings trapped in our own subjective experiences of the world, we can never actually know that any other people have minds in the same way that we have minds, or indeed that these other people have minds at all. Logically speaking, all human-looking creatures around us at any time could be automatons. Their interior mental states are, necessarily, completely inaccessible to us. But it’s impossible to live under that logic (at least without being a total prick), so instead we engage in a type of inductive inference: I know that I move around the world in a human body and I know that I have thoughts, feelings, emotions; that I have a mind. Therefore, I must infer that the other people moving around the world in human bodies, exhibiting the behaviours that imply they have an internal mental world, also have minds. We have trained ourselves, since infancy, to interact with others on the assumption that they have minds comparable to our own, and so have the same capacity for anger, sadness, joy, and love as we do. So, what happens when we are presented with the idea (and it is just an idea) of a robot that looks and moves and walks and talks just like us? We assume, even unconsciously, that they will have internal worlds comparable to ours. When we make this connection, we then imagine them having relationships with us too, whether adversarial, friendly, romantic—or sexual.

It’s not difficult to recall stories that feature robots as sexualised beings. Only six years after Čapek’s play, the Fritz Lang movie Metropolis showed the Maria robot as emotionless and sexualised, eventually embracing her inventor Rotwang. 1972’s The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin centres on a fleet of robot women created solely to please their suburban American husbands. Philip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—later brought to screen as Blade Runner—features Android bounty hunter Deckard sleeping with android Rachael. Released in 1993, Isaac Asmiov’s Forward the Foundation features a historian with a robot wife named Dors. Since the Millennium, there have been increasing numbers of these stories, with people, most often men, falling in love with mostly female-coded robots or artificial intelligences; Her, Lars at the Real Girl and Ex Machina are just three examples. The discourse around these stories always seems to be about the intricacies of these relationships—what does consent look like when you’re dating a non-person? How do you have sex with an android? What is the feminist perspective on female coded chatbots who are designed to pander to male egos?—rather than the fundamental question of whether human-robot relationships would ever occur. If they are going to exist, we seem to be saying, and if they are going to have minds like ours, then of course we’ll fuck them.

Perhaps all of this explains why a book like David Levy's Love and Sex with Robots—with its highly questionable central premise, that we will be marrying and having sex with robots by the year 2050, and it will be considered completely normal—can not only be published, but be lauded by the media establishment. Science fiction has always liked to make grand claims about when robots will become ubiquitous; even Rossum’s Universal Robots was set in the year 2000, when, it said, robots would be cheap and everywhere around us. Love and Sex with Robots, does the same: remember, by 2050, Levy insists that we will be loving, marrying and fucking robots, and this will be perfectly normal. As I write, there are as many years between now and 2050 as there are between this moment and the first series of Robot Wars. It is only nine years before Dr Levy thinks an android might be crowned Time’s Person of the Year. In spring 2023, UCLA made a grand fuss of its robot ARTEMIS who can walk, allegedly, at a speed of 2.1 metres per second, and withstand challenges from human bodies. But their promotional videos show a creation that looks not dissimilar to a Tesla-designed version of Johnny Five from problematic 1986 movie Short Circuit, and though, yes, it has legs and can walk, it doesn’t look in the least bit humanoid. For all the fanfare, ARTEMIS looks like your grandmother could take him out with a swift kick to the knees, and probably outrun him too.

The idea that we might realistically have humanoid robots around by 2050 is sheer fantasy, as roboticists themselves are telling us, and the claim that they’ll be so advanced we’ll be marrying them is surely delusional. There is no real reason to make a humanoid robot, and if we wanted to, we couldn’t, and if we did, we couldn’t power it, and if we do manage to get over any of these significant hurdles, let alone all of them, then that moment won’t come any time soon. This is what the experts are telling us. Yet Love and Sex with Robots and its claims were reviewed completely credulously. Technology journalist Julian Dibbell in The Telegraph said: 'It's no mean feat just presenting a prediction as outlandish as that as unabashedly as Levy does. But more impressive still is how coherently he backs it up.'^[3] The Chicago Sun-Times said: 'The deeper you get into the book, the more difficult it becomes to dismiss his thesis.'^[4] No matter what the facts, it seems, we—and by we I mean both the public at large and the intellectual establishment—simply love a fiction.

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^[1] Living With Robots event, The Edinburgh Futures Institute, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 13^th March 2023

^[2] ‘Sun Yuan and Peng Yu: Can’t Help Myself', Xiaoyu Weng, Guggenheim website. guggenheim.org/artwork/34812. Accessed 5^th January 2024.

^[3] ‘Want to do the Turing Test in bed?’, Julian Dibbell, The Telegraph, 26 April 2008, telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3672902/Want-to-do-the-Turing-Test-in-bed.html. Accessed 5^th January 2024.

^[4] ‘Looking for Mr Roboto’, Chicago Sun-Times, 18^th November 2007.