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.
“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.
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. (lol)
“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.”
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.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?
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life … 645114.ece
“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.
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. (lol)
“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.”
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.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?
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life … 645114.ece