So what was it like researching the possibility of sex with robots? You ended up writing a lot about sex dolls—did you know about sex dolls before you wrote your book?
I hadn't thought about them beforehand at all. It was absolutely fascinating doing the research. Then I got the idea that sex with dolls is like sex with prostitutes—you know the prostitute doesn't love you and care for you, is only interested in the size of your wallet. So I think robots can simulate love, but even if they can't, so what? People pay prostitutes millions and millions for regular services. I thought prostitution was a very good analogy.
And, as you mention in Love and Sex with Robots, brothels in Japan and South Korea already offer sex with dolls for the same rates they would charge for human prostitutes. So in studying sex with prostitutes, you figured you might begin to understand what the thinking behind sex with robots would be.
I started analyzing the psychology of clients of prostitutes. One of the most common reasons people pay for sex was that people wanted variety in sex partners. And with robots, you could have a blonde robot today or a brunette or a redhead. Or people want different sexual experiences. Or they don't want to commit to a relationship, but just to have a sexual relationship bound in time. All those reasons that people want to have sex with prostitutes could also apply to sex with robots.
But sex with robots won't just be a guy thing?
When I started, the research was almost entirely on male clients, but the number of women who pay for sex is on the increase, although there's not much published on the subject. That shows both sexes are interested and willing and desirous to get sex they paid for. Heidi Fleiss is proposing to open a brothel in Nevada where all the sex workers are male and the clients are female. You already have something similar in Spain.
If people fall in love with robots, aren't they just falling in love with an algorithm?
It's not that people will fall in love with an algorithm, but that people will fall in love with a convincing simulation of a human being, and convincing simulations can have a remarkable effect on people.
When I was 10, I was in Madame Tussauds waxworks in London with my aunt. I wanted to find someone to get to some part of the exhibition and I saw someone, 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. And that was just a simple waxwork.
And if you or others could be taken in just by a wax figure, even for a moment, imagine what a realistic robotic simulation of a person would do. But if people are aware that a robot's just electronics, won't that be an obstacle to true love?
By 40 or 50 years, everyone of a marriageable age will have grown up with electronics all around them at home, and not see them as abnormal. People who grow up with all sorts of electronic gizmos will find android robots to be fairly normal as friends, partners, lovers.
Now did science fiction inspire you at all? Because science fiction is naturally one of the first things that leapt to my mind when I think of a society with robots in it.
I don't read science fiction at all. The only sci-fi book I ever read was as a favor to a publisher who wanted a quote from me on the back cover, but the book was so dreadful that I couldn't support it.
Are advances in robotics really going to happen that fast? Wouldn't the technology take up rooms of electronics?
Computer technology is getting faster and more powerful and smaller all the time. What fits in a backpack now could fit in a matchbook in 30 years' time.
If we don't yet completely understand humans, how can we make a humanlike robot?
It will be an iterative process, to be sure. But while we don't understand humans perfectly, we know quite a bit now about human behavior and psychology, and we could program that in.
Isn't your prediction about humans marrying robots in 50 years optimistic?
If you went back 100 years, if you proposed the idea that men would be marrying men, you'd be locked up in the loony bin. And it was only in the second half of the 20th century that you had the U.S. federal government repealing laws in about 12 states that said marriage across racial boundaries was illegal. That's how much the nature of marriage has changed.
I think the nature of marriage in the future is that it will be what we want it to be. If you and your partner decide to be married, you decide what the bounds are, what its purpose is to you.
Would people really want a robot that agreed with everything you wanted or were completely predictable?
I do think there is often a need for friction in relationships. You wouldn't actually want a robot that does everything you want. Most people might want robots that sometimes say, "I don't really want to do that," that rejects certain requests from time to time. So you could program that in, the level of disagreement you want.
And you could program a robot to have different tastes from you. I personally find it very beneficial that my wife has interests that I do not. You could find it fascinating, for instance, that your robot knows a lot about 19th-century South African stamps or the like.
How might human–robot relationships alter human society?
I don't think the advent of emotional and sexual relationships with robots with end or damage human–human relationships. People will still love people and have sex with people. But I think there are people who feel a void in their emotional and sex lives for any number of reasons who could benefit from robots. Other people might try out a relationship with a robot out of curiosity, or be fascinated by what's written in the media. And there are always people who want to keep up with the neighbors.
One point a friend made to me was that there will be people who say, "Oh, you're only a robot." But I also think there will be people who take the view, "Oh, you're only a human."
Isn't falling in love with a robot reminiscent of falling in love in a chat room?
I think it's a very small step at the end of the day—if you are sitting at home talking in a chat room with someone who purports to be a 26-year-old female—between that person being a human or a robot. It's a kind of Turing test. So many people nowadays are developing strong emotional attachments across the Internet, even agreeing to marry, that I think it doesn't matter what's on the other end of the line. It just matters what you experience and perceive.
Do you think others will follow this field?
I was actually recently contacted by a woman at the University of Washington, who wants to write a thesis on human–robot relationships.
What directions will you pursue now?
I'm writing an academic paper on the ethical treatment of robots. Not just the ethics of designing robots to do certain things—people write about whether we should design robots to go into combat and kill people, for instance—but should we be treating robots in an ethical way. If we treat robots in an unethical way, would that be a very bad lesson for other people and children? If it's seen as okay to maltreat robots, would that send a message about living creatures? Robots can certainly have a semblance of being alive.
What does your wife think?
She has a different slant from me. She's not a science person at all—her background's in English and drama; she's not interested in computers or robots or AI. She was totally skeptical of the idea that humans would fall in love with robots. She's still fairly skeptical, but she's beginning to appreciate something like this will happen.
What happens if 50 years from now your predictions have not proved true, and humans and robots don't marry?
I know some people think the idea is totally outlandish. But I am totally convinced it's inevitable. I would be absolutely astounded if I'm proven wrong—not if I'm a few years off, but if I'm proven completely wrong.
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21 Comments
Add CommentWell, that's an excellent way to breed Asperger's characteristics out of the human race.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPersonally, I think that women will be a bigger market than men in the long run. Think of it as the ultimate bodice-ripper novel, or the perfect gigolo, or the walking, talking, no-guilt vibrator. But I doubt that women will stop having sex with men, though a husband may once in a while "kill" his wife's robot lover.
Oh! This is so outlandish that it must be true! He's really thinking outside the box...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWithin fifty years, AI will lose the A. Circuitry will yield to designer flesh that is perpetuated through advanced varieties of nano-bots. The end effect is the continuation of the human mind to the lengths of infinity or whatever becomes the current social quo. By the time sexual androids come into vogue, the problem won't be compatibility with humans and vice-versa, but in effect the ties the "AI" will form and ultimately the respect that all intelligence demands. Until then, a sex-bot could easily fill the niche that prescribes to the long desired three-some.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course, the Greeks thought about this a long time ago, in the myth of Pygmalion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHis argument about 'marrying' robots depends upon his definition of marriage. Only in relatively recent years has marriage been endowed with a sentimental element as opposed to 'necessity' to have a partner to create a family for labour & old-age security or dynastic reasons.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWould be very interesting and important to have a Scientific American special issue on "AE" (Artificial Emotion) with invited articles by Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Alan Kay, Nicholas Negroponte, Stephen Wolfram and other visionaries. Sample speculative fiction by Stanislaw Lem, Olaf Stapledon and others of that caliber would be an important added dimension.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst, before people start marrying robots, i think there will have to be sufficiently convincing emotional AI present to fall in love with. Im sure id fall in love with it, if it existed, even if we never got to 3rd base. The fact is though, it doesn't exist. And AI, although a very promising field, hasn't progressed enough in its entire history to think its going to progress as far as seamless emotional feedback in the next 50 years. It very well could, but i don't see any reason to assume it is likely to happen.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe time line aside, I do not see why in the distant future, this wouldn't be possible. I do not like the analogy with gay marriage though: the mental block that prevented gay marriage was social, what keeps us from serious consideration of marriages that include smart, funny, sensitive robots on the other hand, is their absence from the reality of the present tense. Gay people, on the other hand, did exist in the 60s.
Marrying or even falling in love with robots, seem to be a theory so dangerous to me that even the thought of making it a science is way out of common sense. Today, when the world needs more love and human treatment to survive than ever before in history, it seems to me that the whole idea, besides being dangerous, is totally unethical and completely nuts
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI hope polygamy will not be a problem and you should also be given tax breaks when filing jointly !
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think Dr. Levy is actually rather narrow minded and human-centric. He is focusing on precise copies of a human. If you look at just the underlying human emotions, many people have already fallen into relationships with computers and the internet. The first human computer marriage has already occurred. What would be interesting is steps to encourage human-human relationships.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou know, there is something to said for this. To have a "man" who can do for me the things I want(like cooking and love making), then be switched-off when I want my space.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this> Humans Marrying Robots? A Q&A with David Levy
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBeing Aspie I guarantee that we enjoy human company as much as you Neurotypicals.
And though I might prefer having an easier social life, I don't intend to breed myself out. The possibilities of flesh-on-flesh sex are far from exhausted...
Not everything that makes sense in the abstract is a good idea in practice. For example, feminism and birth control are hard to oppose on a philosophical level, but societies that have adopted them are dying out demographically in favor of societies where women have more traditional roles and birth control is discouraged if not outright illegal. Similarly, what man or woman would put up with the foibles and frustrations of a real-life mate when he or she could have a robotic mate with perfectly sculpted features and a custom-programmed personality? Human nature evolved to cope with certain situations; take us out of those situations and you'll get unpredictable, often undesirable, results. Apples are sweet, but not nearly as sweet as candy, which isolates the attractive element in apples and concentrates it, so people prefer candy to apples. Customized robotic mates would work the same way. Though they might be pleasant, they would be the death knell of human relationships.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI confess to being baffled as to what the criteria was for this "expert" to be worthy of an article in Sci Am?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrom a theoretical standpoint this proposal has been around as long as robots have. Sci Fi authors from Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein in the 50's to the anime series Chobits by the Japanese group Clamp recently, this topic has been theorized, explored, and debated.
He's not proposing anything that isn't be said everywhere, why treat him like he's thinking out of a box?
Nor is it really worthy from a technical standpoint, since he offers nothing in that direction beyond generalities. Conversations I've had with programmers interested in this concept say anything even aproximating meaningful two-way interaction with AI's is several decades away at best. One-way interaction is possible now, marry your toaster.
I just had an incredibly useful scientific epiphany, everyone! We should manufacture a product that is capable of humanlike thought and emotion, but does not feel pain, has no reason to fear death, no instinctive drive to preserve itself, no inherent need for nourishment, and no sense of jealousy unless we choose to program it in. Then let's customize its ability to please us emotionally and sexually, so it does all the things we don't have the guts to ask a human partner to do for us. Then, let's introduce it into society, legalize marrying it, and COMPETE WITH IT FOR MATES.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf this came to pass (and since we're all so obsessed with it, obviously it will), then there would be no need for human-human interaction - even reproduction could be handled with a turkey baster. Any techie geeks that are seriously working on "lifelike" android sex partners should get away from their computer desks quick, and go get laid for real.
Today we demand, 'Robot, be more like me.' Tomorrow we will beg, 'Robot, please make me more like you.'
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLevy's basic premise is that robots will be in many ways better than human. We, as a species, will not allow that to happen. We will integrate the same technologies into our bodies and minds and become super human. There will still be people who ask 'how many of your parts are original?' but I think that the majority simply won't care. The line between man and machine will become so blurry that it will, be irrelevant.
Robotics is simply the next stage of our evolution.
Who is programming these robots? If they know how to make them loveable, where do they learn that? Maybe they could teach that to humans. That would help a lot.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyawn........ more posthumanity anti human talk with people trying to make the human race obselete. i just laugh at posthumanist who think that they can get away with this without a world war. Its a shame that science will be blamed by the unethical view of those who wish to achieve "godhood" . Yeah i trust a bunch of scientists who already have a god complex to treat me as a equal when they become posthumans. Good to see the ground work for Humans vs Robots being laid. X-(
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've read this book by David Levy, although I'm a little concerned about this as well. I think that's a little far fetched for robots to do with humans. But I can see that artificial intelligence will find a present in the world because robots are more accurate than humans in their ability to think.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswe need robot humans in indianapolis!and kokomo!please let us have robot humans in indianapolis!and kokomo! we don't want to buy robot humans!we want to have robot humans!like girlfriend,friends,hookers,pimps,ladiesman,sugardaddie, strippers!please!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlready there are very life like dolls.As for sex, adding sexual mechanics to them would not be to great of a feat,so this kind of thing is but a few years away.It would would eliminate STD's all together,the devices could be thoroughly cleaned after each use.Since the sex bot as you may call them would never be untrue.Unfaithfulness would never be a problem.Now sex aside having someone to talk to,would be nice.An electronic personal assistant that gave you feedback on your feelings,that you could trust to never tell anyone about what you said would be great.It could also keep track all important dates and bills.This could be a computer program on everybody's PC.If such a thing already exist could someone please point out where I could find it?
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