Fucking Machines
03 November 2015 | Lights of Soho, London, UK
Sex Robots are machines in the form of men, women or children for use as sex objects and as substitutes for human partners or prostituted persons. Recent mainstream media has presented a range of these machines with Alex Garland’s Ex-Machina, Spike Jonze’s Her and Channel 4’s Humans all imagining possible futures in which love and sex with artificial life is normalized.
These narratives highlight extreme examples of the sorts of interactions humans may choose to have with human-like machines. But now industry and academia is taking a greater interest in the development of Sex Robots – and as such we must start to take seriously the impact of meaningful human relationships with artificial counterparts.
The recent Campaign Against Sex Robots argues that that these kinds of robots are potentially harmful and will contribute to inequalities in society. The campaign calls for an, “organized approach against the development of sex robots,” with a concern that these machines are being fashioned without first critically examining their potentially detrimental effect on society.
Attempts to critically explore this subject matter has recently led to the Malaysian authorities deeming an academic conference, organized by Adrian Cheok & David Levy, illegal. The decision to shut down the Second Love and Sex with Robots Congress was made by the chief of police who claimed that there was, “nothing scientific about having sex with machines.” This only serves to highlight the visceral reactions that these objects provoke.
As humanoid robots become more widespread how do we develop an engaged ethical response to these new technologies? What software and hardware developments might lead to the development of these sorts of machines? What is the impact of anthropomorphizing machine-substitutes for human partners or prostituted persons? How might the line between fantasy and reality become blurred?
Panelists
Dr. Trudy Barber, School of Media and Performing Arts at University of Portsmouth & Cybersexpert
Dr. Dan O’Hara, Senior Lecturer at New College of Humanities
Dr. Kate Devlin, Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr. Ian Pearson, Futurologist at Futurizon
Moderator: Luke Robert Mason, Director of Virtual Futures
Transcript
Luke Robert Mason: We are here to talk about fucking machines. In London, on a foggy evening, on a Tuesday, for yet another debate about fucking machines. Another curated discussion underlined by our own human insecurity about versions of us in silica. Fucking anthropomorphic fucking machines. Machines that fuck us. And let’s face it, machines are already fucking us, or so we seem to be told.
Robots will kill us. Robots will take our jobs. Robots will be our salvation. Robots won’t understand us. Robots will understand too much about us. Robots will not empathize with us, we will empathize too much with robots. Robots will surpass us. Or…robots will be too dumb to serve us. Robots will not be us. Robots will be too like us. Robots will learn to be a better version of us. Robots will fuck us, and perhaps, we will fuck robots.
That’s if they don’t kill us.
“There is such a strong reaction to killer robots, so why not sex robots?” is exactly the question being asked by the 2015 Campaign Against Sex Robots. But this campaign is not simply about identifying whether human might once again become obsolete. And it’s not merely about the redistribution of labor from the 40 million sex workers worldwide to an army of sex robots. This campaign isn’t really about preempting another West Coast, Silicon Valley mass disruption of the wealth that is generated (and it’s $186 billion) in the market that is prostitution. This panel, perhaps, won’t be about the Uberization of sex. Of course, if it was the app would obviously be called “Luber.” You could get a Luber X…X…X… And of course there would be a ride-sharing option.
The Campaign Against Sex Robots is about a harder rub, an increasing friction, a point of tension. So let me give you the climax that you want. Sellers of sex are often seen by the buyers of sex as things, not recognized as human subjects. Sex robots as objects enforce this narrative. Which means we have some questions to answer.
Are those who engage in human-to-robot sexual relationships interested in sexual engagement with the artifice, with an artificial human on its own terms? Or, do they desire a stimulation with a simulation of human-to-human sexual relations? What becomes expected, what becomes coded, and with this codification of sex will we start to see a datafiction of pleasure responses?
Are orgasm patterns unique? Are they impossible to duplicate? Is your sexual response the ultimate biometric identifier? (Forget fingerprints.) Does our biological sexual programming make us helpless during the sex act? Do we find ourselves in that moment just responding to stimuli? Well, doesn’t that remind us of a machine?
When did persons become things and when do things become persons? How will human/robot relationships change our expectations of human-to-human relationships? Do we want to be machines? Do people want to be optimized fucking machines? Once you go tech, is there any going back?
So, if you have your WD-40 handy… So to answer some of those questions and many more are our esteemed panel.
And the first panelist I would like to introduce is Ian Pearson. Now, Ian Pearson is a futurologist at Futurizon. And the question, Ian, that I want to ask you, because really as a futurologist you’ve been on the forefront of seeing how these innovations might occur and already are occurring. And I just wanted you to give us and our audience the kind of lay on the land, before we start fantasizing about the future of sex robots. And I just want to know what you’re already seeing in the terms of the market for VR and sex robots and perhaps AR. I know you were kind of pivotal in writing the research report of our sponsor Bondara [turns to audience:](Bondara, I mentioned them.) So, I wondered if you could share some of those findings with us.
Ian Pearson: Yeah, I mean, the report I wrote for Bondara was very much near-term technology, and it was quite restricted to sex toys and things like that, really. But we’re already starting to see the beginnings of VR. People are very aware of what you can do with VR, I think. And we’re also becoming aware of what you can do with augmented realities. So I see a future not very far away where you throw away the Oculus Rift really clumsy headset, which really isn’t that much better than the ones we were playing with in 1991, and we replace it with active contact lenses so you could be in bed with one person and you’d see somebody totally different right in front of you, and you don’t have to have the big clumsy headset. And you can change who you have sex with every five seconds, if you so desire.
So you can change the physical appearance of the person you’re playing with. But it goes much further. We’re already starting to see the beginnings of what I call “active skin.” It’s a technology from about fifteen years ago, but we’re now starting to see the very first prototypes of membranes that you can stick of the skin’s surface. And they’re being designed primarily for medical reasons and sports monitoring and things like that. But actually those same membranes can vibrate. You can put polymer gels in them, you can stimulate those and make them contract. That allows you to create a vibrating membrane.
The next generation of that is putting devices right into the skin’s surface and you can link right through to the nervous system. And instead of your wrist obviously you can do that in your genitalia, and we will very soon have the Internet of Genitalia, where you will be able to stimulate electronically across the net, from the cloud—you’ll be able to record an entire sex act and replay it and all of the fun and the sensations. But not only your own sensations, eventually that will be the other person’s sensations as well.
Because the next thing that happens further down the line from that is that we start linking directly into the brain as well—and again that’s beginning to happen a little bit. We’re starting to see the first interfaces happening today. And it won’t be very long before you can actually be in the other person’s nervous system, feeling how much pleasure you’re giving them, and that direct feedback might actually help some of us men to do a better job when we’re stimulation our partners. And of course you’ve now got the more accurate GPS as well, so we can actually find the clitoris. So there are some advantages with this new technology.
But having that direct feedback, I think when look at having sex with a robot, you should assume that that robot has a direct link into your nervous system. It’s not just a penis with a thruster behind it, or a peristaltic sheath. It will actually be able to directly stimulate the nerves inside your body, directly stimulate the nerves inside your head, and to create the sensations that you would have in any kind of sex act.
And that means that you can then share that across the cloud. You could have any number of people sharing the same body during that sex act. You can record any aspect of it, you can replay any aspect of it, you can completely customize it. And in the same timeframe we’re also starting to see the robots themselves becoming artificially intelligent, because that is also moving forwards. None of this happens in a vacuum.
AI is moving very rapidly towards the point of machine consciousness, and those smart machines that we might see in the next ten years will demand their own sex lives. They will demand the same rights that humans have, eventually. And we will expect to have computers redesigning sex, and as they get further and further into our brains we will find that we’re designing external extensions to your brain capability which allow you to redesign sex with extra genders, extra sex acts… You know, the stuff we do today will seem pretty routine and yesterday, not very far in the future.
Mason: So will robots learn how to have sex by “watching us?”
Pearson: I think that they will very quickly analyze what they can find on the Web and think, “Well yeah, that’s fine. That’s what biology does. Now where can we build on that? Let’s take those same ideas and run with them. And what could we design which is far more fun? And how could we roll that out?”
Mason: Do you think the models that are sometimes freely available on the Web, do you think they’re the best models from which robots should be learning how to…?
Pearson: I think robots…well, they can learn something from human beings, but that’s the starting point—I see that very much as a starting point. And when we’re looking at evolutionary AI development, you put in everything you know about how to possibly do it into an evolutionary engine, and then you let it experiment and discover for itself. And that’s the best model, I think. We could…I mean, just like the Bynars invented the holodeck on Star Trek you know, the AIs that we have in ten, fifteen years’ time will redesign the whole of the sexual experience for human beings and find far better ways of producing sexual stimulation. So today we might think of typing Ctrl-Shift‑O for an orgasm…it’ll be a lot more fun than that as we go into the future.
Mason: I now want to go to Kate. So Ian’s kind of given us the range of possible futures for both our own bodies, human bodies, being augmented by it sounds like internal vibrating chips. But you’re very specifically focused on this Campaign Against Sex Robots, and I wanted you to explain for the audience who may not know what the Campaign Against Sex Robots is, just a little bit about that campaign and the reason why you’re in defense of the sex robots.
Kate Devlin: Yeah. I’d like to say, I’m against the Campaign Against Sex Robots. So my background is in human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. And I think this campaign is incredibly short-sighted.
So, it was started by two academics, Kathleen Richardson and Erik Billing, and their main thrust, as it were, is that sex robots—and it is sex robots as they exist today; they do exist and they are basically mechanized sex dolls. Sex robots as they exist today, and as they see them developing, are essentially objectification of women. It will lead to another form of sex work that is essentially an anti-feminist movement.
And I can see where that is coming from, but however I would say that that it is not the case necessarily and that we should never ever try to shut down technology that’s in its infancy. And so what I’m interested in is saying well, we can see where this is going. We know there is an appetite for this. We know there’s demand for these sex robots.
But why should they be focused entirely on this very heteronormative male view? This is an era when there is so much exploration going on of sexuality, of gender identity, and there’s a lot of very contentious issues being discussed. I mean, you don’t want to get into one of those debates on Twitter, right? I’m staying well away from them. And I think that sex robots—robots in general but specifically sex robots—provide us with kind of a blank canvas to start exploring those things. And that just to say “ban all development” is really shortsighted—it sort of reeks of moral panic. We’ve got an opportunity here to take that technology and start to explore what it means to have a certain sexuality, what influence sex has on our brains—so the cognitive approaches, the social approaches—and our own identities. And we can explore that in terms of artificial intelligence and in terms of how we actually make a robot that can feel desire, that can have a sexuality. And, does it need to have a particular gender? Does it need to have a particular sexuality? So I think these are all questions that if we were to ban sex robots we’d be shutting down this discussion.
Mason: So just, if you do want to get in a flamewar on Twitter over the next hour and a half, we’re tweeting on #VFSalon. But Kate, I do want to ask you— You said you sort of understand where that desire and the fear against sex robots comes from. Where does it come from?
Devlin: Well, I think that anybody that would sort of have any kind of declaration of themselves as a feminist, myself included, we do not want to contribute to anything that in any way harms women. So I can see that there is that reaction that it may objectify women, yes. I think that applies to lots of things. Like porn. Like sex work. But again, this is something that is very very nuanced. It’s something that requires a lot of exploration and debate before we just automatically say, “No, that should not happen.” And that is something that I don’t feel I could automatically take a stance on. I think it needs a lot more exploration, and banning something outright is not going to give us that exploration.
Mason: Thank you, Kate. And Trudy, you’ve kind of been at the forefront of these debates. I love being able to tell people I know the UK’s leading cybersexpert. Which is always a great way to open a conversation, and maybe close a conversation in a bar.
But I want to ask you what you’ve seen over the last sort of fifteen-plus years. (Trudy’s only twenty-five.) Is there something more nuanced happening here? Is there… Where’s the reaction coming from? Is it coming from our visceral reaction to anthropomorphic robots that look like us? Or do you actually think there’s maybe a desire to have sex with robotic things and objects?
Trudy Barber: I think… Well, having been involved with this sort of research and these kind of themes since about 1991, I’ve seen various elements of sex and virtual reality. I’ve seen remote-controlled vibrators and dildos and all sorts of stuff. I’ve seen the sex drive actually becoming part of the drive for innovation. And I’m quite interested in the way that with all this technology, with the access to the Internet, with all these things, is that we’ve totally now divorced the sex act with procreation. And its now sex act for pleasure.
So we’re dealing with different types of entertainment, Sex as entertainment, sex as pleasure. Therefore the doll becomes the toy. I mean, women have been using vibrators instead of men…or, as men—well, with men or whatever, for millennia. And it’s kind of an intensification and an amplification of all of this? And I think that the way that we are in love with our technology—like Latour discusses the idea that we have a love of our technology, we are embracing it, we become part of our technology—that it’s inevitable that we will want to have sex, or just have pleasure with the technology. You know, the videos of people unwrapping their iPads…it’s fetishistic, its so sexy. Everything with technology is sexy! And that’s why we want to have sex with robots—it’s why we want to be the robots.
Mason: Samsung or iPhone user?
Barber: Ooh, I’m a Samsung.
Mason: Alright, so Steve Jobs is not to blame?
Barber: No it’s not Steve Jobs’ fault, no.
Mason: So you mentioned Trudy, this sex drive is often a drive for innovation. What do you mean by that?
Barber: Well I think it’s a drive to create something new. The sex drive “traditionally” was to procreate, “to create new life.” And now we’re doing it in a completely different way, with different ways of looking at technology, with different ways of being creative in a more open sense rather than just being human. And that’s where it becomes really different. That’s where having sex with robots, having sex with your technology— You can have an Onahole that you attach to your iPad and you can you know, have a quick old go with that whilst your doing your Skyping with your girlfriend or whatever. It’s more of an extension of McLuhan’s extension[s] of man, it’s the extension of our very sense of being, I think. And some people feel really alive in that orgasmic moment, and I think we’re still all searching for that. So, I think the sex robot is part of our evolution. I mean even budgies will have sex with a plastic budgie in their cage. It’s something that’s kind of innate in being alive.
Mason: There’s a reason for the, as I think you’ve phrased it, “the randy budgie.”
Barber: Yeah. Yeah, the randy budgie.
Mason: It comes from, really, the isolation of the budgie, is that it?
Barber: There is the isolationism. There is also the… I mean, I’m quite interested in how a lot of the students I look at when I’m in an academic environment, where everybody is like, in their iPhones—they become iPhone or mobile phone zombies. And they become part of this sense of self that is so squashed in, and so in a corridor, that it’s only inevitable that this kind of behavior with your machine takes on different elements of the self and squashes you in. So it’s a whole dichotomy of just expressing pleasure and also expressing a sense of self.
Mason:So we’ve seen…and I should ask you Dan, have we seen these sort of narratives appear perhaps in science fiction? You’re a senior lecturer in Literature at the New College of the Humanities, where you look at how science fiction narratives both lead forward into the future and reveal something about us and what it means to be human. I want to ask you, have you already seen this kind of narrative play out before, in fiction?
Dan O’Hara: Well to start with, um—
Mason: Was there another question I was supposed to ask?
O’Hara: As my students can confirm, no we don’t talk much about sex robots.
Mason: Eighteen grand a year and there’s no…?
O’Hara: Well, maybe if there’s special request. Yeah, of course, we have seen these narratives before and they tap in very directly into the kind of social situations that Trudy is describing. If you think back to Mary Shelley, and the most famous example, Frankenstein’s monster. Frankenstein’s monster learns how to be human from imitating and listening to humans. But what Frankenstein’s monster wants in the end is a Mrs. Frankenstein, a similar being to himself.
But there are lots of more recent examples, and I think most relevant is Isaac Asimov in the 1950s. There’s a novel called The Robots of Dawn which features a humaniform robot, Daneel, with which one of the characters in the novel has a sexual relationship—an illicit relationship, in fact regarding this robot as her partner, as her husband.
The interesting thing about that story is the backdrop to it, the society in which it happens. And it’s a society in which human contact, touch, has become taboo. And there’s lots of interesting scientific work on touch becoming taboo. Increasingly, we’re finding it more and more difficult to touch each other.
But then the most recent example, I suppose, is the one that you know…I specialize in the works of JG Ballard, so every time there’s a news story about someone getting arrested for having sex with tractors or bicycles, my Twitter feed is just kind of a deluge of these stories.
Mason: Oh that’s the reason.
O’Hara: Yeah, absolutely. And of course Ballard wrote this famous novel in 1973, Crash, which you may have seen the Cronenberg film of and is famously thought to be about people deriving sexual excitement from having car crashes. But Ballard added a caveat. He famously, or not famously enough, said, “Actually that’s not what I was doing in the novel. What I was interested in is people getting sexually excited by the idea of car crashes.”
In a way that’s much more disturbing. And one of the things that’s missing from the debate, as I see it generally, is just how much sex is happening in the mind, just how much sex is about being stimulated by ideas as much as mechanics.
Mason: [to Trudy Barber:] Did you see that in any examples that you came across? Is it 80% fantasy, 20% technology?
Barber: When I did my PhD I had the privilege of studying a group of people who were playing around with ideas of gender but they were also what I would call “technofetishists.” They really loved their computer kit. They loved going online. And this was in the late 90s.
And what they did was they created their own server, they built their own server. They also ordered a whole load of sort of medical stimulation equipment. And what they did was they would have one person volunteer to put on all this kit. So it would be things attached to the nipples, and the genitalia, various areas all around the body. It was kind of like Stelarc really, but it was homegrown—this is the other thing that’s always interesting about this. And they were connected to a server. And the people who were part of this group invited other people from around the world to connect on this server and stimulate this individual.
Now, while the individual was being stimulated, in their head they were… Well, the guy was probably Dave, but in his head he became Stephanie. And I sort of studied and watched Stephanie being transformed into Stephanie just purely through this whole connection.
So you had a group of people that were absolutely passionate about the kit, but they were also passionate about giving pleasure to “Stephanie,” and Stephanie experiencing her transformation, maybe psychologically in her mind—well definitely—but also afterwards she felt that she was a woman from that experience.
Mason: And that’s a human-to-human connection mediated by the tech.
Barber: Yeah, by the technology, and it was all homegrown, it was garage stuff in 1998.
Mason: But then, Kate, what happens if there is no human feedback? The issue with sex robots is the question of whether these things are going to be artificial entities that are aware they’re artificial entities, or we’ll have a drive to make them look, sound like us—more anthropomorphic. There’s been mention of not just women but children as well, to cure pedophilia?
Devlin: Right. This is one of the areas where sex robots requires a lot of investigation to work. Because in terms of artificial intelligence, one of the big goals of artificial intelligence is to create a system—a cognitive system—that behaves like a human. It’s not the only goal but its a big one. The idea then being that then you will you have this sentient machine that can feel, that can desire, that can express emotion.
But even without bringing that into it, even without that sentience, you get issues when say, someone makes a child robot, a child sex robot, okay. This is obviously something that would be very concerning. Because we know there’s already laws against obscene material featuring children, even if that is generated by a computer. There are laws against that. What happens then when someone makes a child robot as a sex robot? What happens if they make an animal robot as a sex robot? And there’s a problem with law and policy. It doesn’t—it can’t keep up with technological advances very well. And so that needs exploring, that needs examining as to what happens when things break social taboos or break legal areas, legal issues. And I think that’s an area that requires work.
Mason: Ian, is there another issue? You said something about the squeamishness or maybe the uncanny valley when it comes to sex robots? Do you think as a futurist we’ll ever overcome that?
Pearson: Yes and yes. There is an uncanny valley, definitely. If you make a robot which looks a little bit humanlike but not very, then a few fetishists will enjoy playing with it, just like the plastic inflatable doll. Most of us will think, “Oh, I’m not doing that. That’s just a pretend thing. I want a real human being.” Most of us are faced with the uncanny valley and opt for the human being. That is really a technological progress thing. Eventually we’ll get to the point where you can make a completely convincing robot doll.
But the other side of it is that you can do an awful lot of that in the virtual reality space. You can do a lot in the augmented reality space. So you could be looking at that plastic inflatable doll, but what you’re seeing in your eyes is a completely lifelike human being. And you can also do—you know, with the active skin relays, if you like to call them that, you could make it feel exactly like a real human being as well. So what you can with the physical technology is a limitation. But you can make up an awful lot of that with the augmented and virtual reality.
And that brings us back, actually, to the objectification of women. I think this is a problem. You get objectification of men as well but most of us men don’t care. It doesn’t worry me at all if somebody objectifies me, but you know, some women worry about it. But if I’m walking up Regents Street back to the train station this evening, if I’m wearing augmented reality contact lenses and I could look at every single woman I’m walking past and see exactly what she behaves like in bed, exactly what she looks like naked, and I can download all of the stuff off the net of exactly her sexual experiences and stuff, that is the next generation of objectification. And we’re heading there at a heck of a rate of knots. This is a problem. I’m not suggesting that we can’t solve it, but the lawyers will not be able to keep up and I’m not entirely sure that society will keep up. And a small percentage of people will not find it easy to balance the two and lead a happy, balanced sexual life.
Mason: So to Ian, and also to all the panel, what is going to stop that, and equally, who then owns the datafication of your sex experience?
Pearson: I don’t know. It depends how we build it. I mean, at the moment it could be anybody, under any circumstances, in any part of the world. You know, some kid in a teenage bedroom could be writing this with no control by the authorities whatsoever. It appears on the net, everybody’s using it before anybody even thinks about debating it and making laws about it. It’s already mainstream culture. And that’s the speed of technology development now.
Barber: And probably somebody will want to monetize it. So can you imagine, you’re in the middle of your cybersex dream with your artificial doll and suddenly Pepsi!; advert comes up at the appropriate moment, through your—
Mason: Gillette, the best a man can get. Yeah.
Barber: Yeah. Can you imagine that frightening future, that everything—actually our sexual pleasure becomes entirely part of the capitalist monetizing part of pleasure? Even worse than it is now.
Mason: [to Kate Devlin:] The campaign about sex robots and the way in which David Levy talks about sex robots is already drawing parallels to prostitution—
Devlin: Yep.
Mason: —and, perhaps you could explain for this audience at least David Levy’s viewpoint.
Devlin: David Levy’s work, he’s one of the earlier…did some of the early research on sex robots, and saw it very much as being a sex work economy, with robots taking the place of sex workers. Which is what the Campaign Against Sex Robots has sort of been trying to combat, this idea that it will lead to further objectification of women.
I don’t know that his vision is necessarily something that will necessarily come true. It may, but I think we have the chance to shape that. And I think there’s a lot more tied into it than just will these robots take the form of sex work. Sex work is a much more nuanced debate to be looked into rather than saying a robot will come along and it will replace the sex worker.
Mason: So the issues that come specifically with that— I mean, some of the research that I know Ian’s focused on, men are the chief buyers of sex, and females are the chief buyers of the toys. But both are sort of masturbatory objectification experience.
Devlin: This is a chance to bring them together, really. So you have sex toys and you have sex work as separate ideas. A sex robot is this blank canvas still, it’s still in its infancy, why can’t we have sex robots that appeal to just more than the straight male? I think there’s just so much scope to do this. Who says a sex robot has to look human even, I mean? It could be anything. There’s no limit here. We don’t have the physical limits when it comes to this sort of thing. We’re not tied to a human depiction, we’re not tied to any kind of binary.
Mason: Well that idea of the sex robot could be anything… I know that some of your work in the philosophy of technology, Dan, focuses on sort of nonhuman agency, and perhaps we won’t be desiring things that look and feel human, but entirely different technologies. You know what I’m leading to?
O’Hara: I do.
Mason: So Dan was the co-founder of VF. You are the hardest person on the panel. This is Socratic method. And his students are sitting there going, “I know exactly what’s going on here.” Talk about biobots Dan!
O’Hara: Alright. Actually I want to lead back to the Asimov thing again, that Asimov story. The think that’s interesting about the robot in that is that it’s completely humanoid. And you can’t distinguish between these robots and humans, other than for the fact that they obey slightly higher moral standards than humans do. Which is a lovely idea. And that’s the model that we’ve always taken, and that’s the model we’re thinking of right now when we’re talking about humanoid robots. And that’s the model also for AI: human-like cognition.
Except…that’s not necessarily the direction in which research is going. Because many robots are not moving toward humanoid forms, and they’re not moving towards even mechanical forms like Pepper or Terminator, as your most famous example. But they’re moving towards softer forms, what Rudy Rucker called “wetware.” So we’ve already started to have robots made from sprayable foam, or invertebrate rubber robots, or indeed programmable chemical gels.
Now, that’s a kind of world of mixed materiality, where you might need a programmer to program digitally, but you’re also talking about somebody who’s able to program the DNA of something that’s half living, half mechanical. And this kind of mixed world, if that starts to intersect with sex robots and you have programmable chemical gel robots, you’re moving away from silicon and towards silicone, and that raises…
Mason: But then that’s not an artificial human—
O’Hara: It’s a whole new [crosstalk] kind of ballgame.
Mason: It’s artificial life.
O’Hara: It is artificial life. Yeah.
Mason: Then what would it mean to have the sexual act with something that could be “a‑live” or “living.”
O’Hara: Well let’s assume that it’s life, first of all, in a natural sense, but not necessarily in an AI sense, because not everybody agrees that we’re ever going to get AI. We’ve got AI at the moment, but it’s pretty stupid. You know, you think of your GPS or satnav systems or what have you. And that’s the sort of level of intelligence of robot that you can look at to have sex with. It’s not very enticing is it?
However, if there’s a certain natural component to that, that can evolve and grow and change in itself, then we’re talking about something slightly less predictable, and we’re also interestingly, in connection with the “Internet of Things” worry that if these robots are networked… You know, originally we used the phrase “computer virus” as a metaphor from biology. There’s no real viruses. But if you’re having sex with a bacterial quasi-bio-hybrid thing… We start to see the metaphor becoming literal again. Now, I don’t want to scare anyone…
Barber: Spot of rust, dear.
Mason: Spot of rust. Well, obviously wetware for a reason, in that case.
Ian, I want to jump back to you if I can. What are these things going to look like, at least in our short term? So I know the Bondara report you were involved with said that virtual sex would be here, and it would be as casual as porn by 2030. By 2025, robotic sex toys would be available for the wealthy. By 2035, sex toys will interact with virtual reality. And by 2050, robosex may overtake human sex. I just wondered where those trends have emerged from, and what you think’s going to drive some of those trends.
Pearson: Yeah, what’s driving my thinking on that timeline is the stuff I’m observing about the growth of AI. And it’s not all digital stuff, there’s a lot happening in the analogue domain in AI development as well. And we will end up with computers which are very sensitive to human emotions—that’s been a goal in R&D and IT companies now for well over a decade. We’ve been trying to make computers more emotional and more receptive and responsive to human emotions—so picking up the emotions of the people and directly responding to that is a big thing. And you can do it. We know how to do it. We know how to detect emotions and we have some of the AI skills to respond to that, and that whole field’s moving on.
Also, people like Honda and Sony and all the other big IT manufacturers are desperately trying to make robots to work around our home, do physical jobs, do the cleaning. But they also want to make [robots] which are really good at companionship. And the best model we have for that is to make it very human-like with nice personalities and nice emotional responses. So we will get those robots. You’ll probably buy one the same price as a reasonable price car. And you will have one in your house, which you might as well buy one that you fancy as one that’s pig ugly—
Mason: Well this is the problem—
Pearson: —and then you will end up having sex with it.
Mason: But Ian this is the problem that’s arisen and its part of the reason for the Campaign Against Sex Robots. If you buy Pepper now, which is a—
Devlin: Ooh, you can’t have sex with Pepper.
Mason: Well, you have to sign a clause saying—
Devlin: You have to sign a clause saying you will not have sex with Pepper. Pepper is a social companion robot in Japan, and it’s specifically written into the contract that it will void the guarantee and null the warranty if you have sex with— Do not have sex with Pepper.
Audience 1: [inaudible] serviceable parts.
Devlin: Well, this is the thing. So, companion robots exist. We have companion robots in the home, beyond just the robot vacuum cleaner. You know, big in Japan. And so these things are already there. We have assistant and healthcare robots, and there’s a big EU drive to explore this. There’s a whole new initiative about companion robots and care robots. And so it’s about how those are going to be exploited. And if you have to actually write that into the clause then evidently someone’s been trying that somewhere, okay. There’s definitely—
Mason: There’s a reason for that.
Devlin: There’s a reason they’ve written this in. And I think while it may be unpalatable for companies at the moment to explicitly state that they are going to go down that route of research, I think it’s inevitable that they will. Although, it’s taken Dyson sixteen years to produce a robot vacuum cleaner so don’t hold your breath for a Dyson one anytime soon. But I think that it’s unavoidable, yeah. I agree with Ian on that.
Mason: But there’s no clause against the suction on a robot…
Devlin: I would not like to speak for Dyson, I haven’t looked at the small print.
Mason: I’m not asking for me, just FYI. But Trudy, is it going to be productized or is there going to be a whole sort of open source, DIY movement? Some of the things you talked about are the semi female-shaped objects and DIY fuck piñatas.
Barber: Oh yes!
Mason: How could we forget the fuck piñatas?
Barber: There are people who have made their own artificial woman out of bits of paper and cardboard and a rubber glove. Oh, you just would not imagine.
Pearson: Damn, I hadn’t thought thought of that.
Barber: Behave. One of the things that you were talking about just made me think…when you think of the future and all these sex robots and everything that could be created, a lot of the population is going to be a lot older. Now then, we’re going to be losing our partners, they’re going to die. So will there be a way of actually having—you know, the robot personal assistant or helper—that could represent the partner that we’ve had for twenty years or something? And could we say oh um, I want— Say that I’ve got the lovely Ed as my partner. “Could I have the lovely Ed as he was ten years ago?”
Mason: Oh, Ed.
Barber: No no no, this is if we were like seventy or eighty. Do you see what I mean? Do you see what I mean? You could, technically say, if you overwrite it with somebody—
Ed: [Unclear:] You do realize I’m a robot, you haven’t owned me—
Barber: Damn! I mean, you could have long-term relationships when they die, your partner dies, and you’ve got this new technology, this robotic technology, are you going to say, “Actually I don’t want to have this new person, I actually want the person back that I’ve lost.” So…
Mason: So there’s precedent for…
Barber: Yeah, there’s a different— There’s… Maybe there’s other ways that we can have our conversations with our robots that actually give us back something that we’ve lost. And maybe that’s something why we’re talking about robots. Because maybe there’s something about being ourselves that we have lost, and maybe an attempt to reclaim it through creating artificial versions of ourselves.
Mason: [to O’Hara] So back again to the science fiction narratives that have dealt with these issues of versions of ourselves and anthropomorphism. I mean, obviously that’s precedent for having something that looks and sounds like someone who existed as human. But again, what are the sort of expressions of a robot that would express its own sexual identity? Or how could we start thinking about that?
O’Hara: How can we start thinking about…? I haven’t quite got it. How can we start thinking about a robot expressing desire?
Mason: Well no, a robot expressing its own morphology, its own way of being, perhaps robots having sex with each other. What would synthetic biobots—would they have sex lives?
O’Hara: Bacterial sex, yes. Of a kind. I think we start… One of the ways we tend to trap ourselves is by thinking purely in terms of the frame of AI and robots in general, which is around mechanical and digital computing. And I think what we want to do instead is start thinking about the animal world, not just the artificial world. We want to start thinking about nature and the way in which natural computing is starting to blend those two worlds.
And once you start doing that, then you start to see that the science fiction writers who were the real visionaries were perhaps not people like Asimov, who provided you with a vision of a humanoid robot that you’re having sex with, but indeed somebody like JG Ballard, who’s talking about these very strange people deriving sexual satisfaction from engaging with architecture, for example. Now, there’s an idea. Synthetic biology is also working in architecture. We’re starting to have living architecture, living buildings. Now…what about having sex with a building?
Devlin: Depends on the building.
Barber: Somebody married the Eiffel Tower, didn’t they? They did, a woman married the Eiffel Tower.
Mason: But to your point Trudy, there’s a whole move of people who are interested in having sex with robots. Is it called…correct me if I’m wrong, but forniphilia?
Barber: Oh crikey, I don’t know. There’s so many versions of sort of…philias.
Pearson: Forniphilia?
Barber: Forniphilia.
Mason: Is it forniphilia?
Pearson: Well that’s using them as mannequins or statues.
Barber: Yeah, statues.
Pearson: Which you can do, yeah.
Mason: Oh it’s…right.
Devlin: And that’s one of the earliest—
Audience 2: Can I just give you a point of information? Somebody had an affair with a train in the London Transport Museum.
Devlin: An ongoing affair?
Audience 2: It’s serious, and wants to marry it, yeah.
Devlin: Oh, bless. I was going to say that one of the earliest stories that we have of this “artificial life for sex” purpose is Pygmalion and his sculpture, where he brought it to life with a kiss because he wanted to have this statue and possess it and have a sexual relationship with a statue. So you know, nothing new under the sun.
Mason: Well, nothing new under the sun, but do you think when there is a lack of awareness, full stop, about sort of how our relationships to objects currently, or to technology currently, is guiding our way of thinking about the race and the gender and the design of these robots? To pretty much all of the panel.
Barber: I think it’s how we perceive pleasure and how pleasure is communicated. And if you’re talking about sort of the whole biotechnology, and these entities having sex with each other, we’re talking about different realms of experiencing pleasure, and how do we define pleasure, and how do we express it, and how is my pleasure different to your pleasure? And, is that part of how we identify each other? By the way that we experience pleasure. Because as I was saying, we’ve kind of divorced the sex act from procreation, we’re now just looking at notions of pleasure. So it opens up a whole new arena for experiencing just being alive, and maybe “sex robots” could be part of the beginning of that kind of exploration of pleasure.
Mason: So with regards to… Just this conversation in general, we’ve been lucky that both Bondara’s allowed us to be here in Lights of Soho and have allowed us to be here to have this conversation, but how do we have these sort of conversations about something which is borderline taboo? And I’m referring to the fact that David Levy and Adrian Cheok’s Second [Conference] of Love and Sex with Robots—you may have seen this—
Barber: I’m on the committee and I reviewed the papers. And the papers were superb and I was thinking “Oh my goodness!”
Mason: So just to explain, if you haven’t seen the recent press, there was a gentleman called Adrian Cheok who’s very much focused on the hardware side. He’s known for the kissing robots and the hugging vests. He’s at City of London University, I think but he’s based in Malaysia at the moment.
And the Congress, which I know Kate’s been involved in—the first Love and Sex with Robots Congress, was actually canceled by the Malaysian police, the Malaysian Chief of Police on the proviso that there was “nothing scientific about sex with robots. In Malaysia we do not allow anal sex and with robot neither.” So this was— [laughter] Direct translation. So this conversation is already being… I mean Malaysia’s a very special case. But it’s very easy to get—especially when it comes to talking about future and tech, when those collide, it’s very easy to get giggly and exited about these discussions in the wrong way. How do we have an informed discussion, Kate? How do we do it?
Devlin: Yeah, I mean— How do we do it, I wish I would completely answer— I think by being open about it is one thing. I remember at one point at a research conference lunch, talking to someone and actually using the words “actuated vagina,” and then I realized that I just used the words “actuated vagina” in a research conversation. To other people this might be weird. I think it’s something we should be really open about, and I just refuse to get phased about it anymore. Because that’s the way that things are going.
In the case of the conference in Malaysia, that was perhaps not the wisest choice of venue in terms of cultural decisionmaking. You know, we hosted a Love and Sex with Robots Symposium at Goldsmiths in 2014, and it was very successful. We had a documentary crew along to film it as well. It was part of the AISB (Artificial Intelligence Similar Behavior) Convention that I was co-chairing there.
And David Levy came along to talk about the work there. He came to use first of all and said, “Well look, we want to do this conference but we’ve got a lot of very explicit material. Is it going to be okay to show this?” And we went, “Hey, we’re Goldsmiths, right? Anything goes here.” And fortunately, that was the case. And it had a big draw, it had a big draw. All the media coverage for the convention was like, “Oh, do you know there’s a love and sex with robots thing?”
So yeah, I think it’s about being really open about it and getting public engagement, making things really explicit, if you pardon the pun. But just to try and encourage people to talk about it. And I think technology is something that allows us to do that with the Internet, you know, with people using the Web more and more, you’ve seen a lot more work around sexuality and gender identity politics, and all that sort of stuff that would not have arisen without the Internet. And so I think that that’s a chance to progress that in terms of sex robots.
Barber: I was part of the conference and stuff. But the thing you were mentioning about making it more open, having more people talking about it. One of the things I’m quite interested in at the moment is the advent of haptics, of course, with social media. And there are people now experimenting with a kind— Well, I’m calling them Multiple Open Haptic Online Orgies, or MOHOOs, where you’ve got all lots of people joining together having this kind of haptic sexual sensation. And because we’ve got social media and things like Facebook and stuff, where people are being open, talking about things and communicating in that way, that the next step is the feelie version of it. And I think that might be part of the groundbreaking element to get everybody talking about these things.
Mason: So Ian, do you think it’s going to go the way of online dating? Is it one of these things that we talk about in Soho in a panel, and then in a couple of years’ time it’s suddenly advertised on billboards. Do you think?
Pearson: Yeah, I think a lot of it will happen via that kind of route. But what we’re starting to see in online communities, one of the biggest virtual communities online of course is Second Life. And they’re already bringing Oculus Rift into there, and they’re already starting to explore it. And next year another generation of that technology comes out. But there is already a very vibrant sexual community in Second Life. Probably most of the people are in Second Life for that reason. And that is today’s sort of dating technology, and it’s how people experiment, and people are messing around with all sorts of things like converting other people into statues and mannequins and locking them electronically in place.
And yet at the same time neuroscientists are discovering how to do that in real life. You know, you apply a voltage to the right part of your brain and you can actually freeze somebody and switch off their consciousness. And you can stimulate the vagus nerve, you create orgasms and stuff. So we’re starting to link together what you can do inside cyberspace and what you can do in real life.
But there’s a really important bit that we’ve missed so far in this conversation, I think, which is the transgender community has also been doing a great deal of the exploration of the next frontiers in this. And you get a man that wants to be a woman, or vice versa occasionally. You could do that electronically. I could buy a female robot, maybe in twenty years, I can link my nervous system into that, maybe use some enhancement extra little bits in the IT and the cloud to provide extra mapping space to link on the female genitalia and so on. I could be female in a much stronger way than I could today, going and getting an operation [crosstalk] Far East somewhere. I think it’s a very strong way of developing the next generation of this kind of technology.
What is it you object to?
Audience 3: I have to object to that.
I’m sorry, the idea that… You’re making a social judgment. I mean, being male or female is as much a social role as it is a physical role. And saying that having a robot is more authentically female in any sense than a trans person experiences being their actual gender, that is hugely problematic, and I’m sorry for interrupting [inaudible].
Pearson: I don’t believe I said that. I said it was tool that they can use. I’m saying that that community could use that as a technique. I’m not saying that’s the best way of them doing it. I’m not providing any value judgment, I’m just saying it’s a technology that would be feasible. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not creating any value judgment on that at all. I’m just observing that the technology will become possible.
Mason: So do you think then…the problem becomes the feedback loop? So we anthropomorphize these robots, and then we slowly want to become…them, and they…?
Pearson: I don’t think that having the technology available will necessarily force a lot of people to go down that route. But people who do want to go down that route, it’s an extra option for them. And because some people might want to do that and because they’re doing it in a community which is…I think at the moment it’s actually got quite a lot of backing and a lot of us are very supportive of the transgender community, I think that that might be something where we can all agree that yeah we could all go down that way a little bit faster than we would have done otherwise because some people might benefit from it, whereas otherwise we might have been very wary of it and tried to make laws against it. So it might open certain frontiers which might otherwise be more difficult to penetrate. And I think that’s a good thing.
Mason: So, maybe less on changing gender, but do you think we will want to make ourselves more robotic? I know, Trudy, you’ve looked at…let me get the terms right, “androidism” and “maskers?”
Barber: Yeah.
Mason: The androidism of the music artist Janelle Monáe, and if you could explain maskers.
Barber: Maskers are mostly guys that like to completely dress up, usually in complete rubber suits, and they like to see themselves as the opposing gender. So mostly it’s men who want to become these women, but they’re wearing complete masks, and they’re wearing complete bodysuits. It’s kind of like what I was talking about with my earlier research where you had this group of people who connected themselves up to the technology. But this is a kind of fetishistic group that do this. Because there’s certain connection with the actual material that they cover themselves with, which is like rubber.
But I’m particularly interested in transgender—really quite importantly, because I think it’s part of the research into innovation, and it’s part of that drive to be what you think you really should be that is part of that innovative drive. And part of that is your sexuality and your gender. And I’m quite interested in the transition process from one gender to the other, and I’m starting to look at a certain research project, which I won’t really go into because it’s in the very early stages. But looking in terms of not necessarily robotics as such, but in terms of animated holographics in order to identify different elements of sexuality and ideas of gender, but depending if you perceive gender as being performative.
So there’s lots of different layers going on that we can assume about gender, which may not be the case as well. So it’s a marvelous bowl of different things that we can look at about sexuality, about gender, about pleasure, about entertainment, about procreation, about our creative urges, about our innovation. And I think just it’s… I mean, you guys are in this time where all these things are happening and I just wish and hope that I will still be able to see it in my lifetime in almost a transhumanist or posthumanist future.
Mason: So I think… So the great thing about Virtual Futures Salon is you guys are curated as heavily as these guys, and I would love to spend about half an hour opening up to audience questions. I will just say this now: we are recording. If you don’t want your contribution placed on the Web please come and see me afterwards. We’re recording both the audio and film. But, don’t let that stop you asking a question, we’ll be more than happy to edit out. So we’d love to open it up to this audience for the next about half an hour. Please sir.
Audience 4: I’m confused.
Mason: Another hour. So…
Audience 4: Because we seem to have started with an assumption about what we mean by sex. And Trudy was clear that sex is now separate from procreation. Although we’ll still need some sort of procreation. But you then jumped immediately to saying that sex was about pleasure… And I wonder if that’s what we’re all agreed on. But it’s a very specific type of pleasure, and it also must have some correlation with relationship, hasn’t it?
Devlin: Can I say that from the artificial intelligence point of view, from a cognitive systems point of view, I’m interested in sex as a fundamental human motivator. So it’s something that is absolutely fundamental and vital to being human, in that we are here to procreate. Although, you know—
Audience 4: That’s individu— It’s individual.
Devlin: It can be individual. But I think that human sex no longer no longer has to mean procreation. In human terms, we can procreate without the actual sex act. That’s why you have IVF and things like that. So it is actually divorced from it in human terms as well.
In terms of is it for pleasure, I don’t know. I mean, it’s associated with—as a colleague of mine, Chris, who’s a sexual psychologist will say—it’s associated with a whole raft of different wellbeing measures. So it is intrinsic to our lives, it’s valuable to our lives. So I’m interested in seeing how it impacts our brain, how it impacts our way of thinking.
Barber: One of the things I’m quite interested in as well is the idea of the synaesthetic orgasm. So it depends if you see things, if you hear things, if you sensate differently in your orgasmic moment, or your identification of pleasure. And I would be interested to see how that would translate within a digital culture.
Audience 5: Some of us are hunters. Some of us like to find someone attractive and go and get them. And what strikes me about technology is that it’s a very lazy way of experiencing pleasure because everything is—you can customize everything, you can order a robot… You know, you can get an orgasm at the end of the day, but where is this pursuit aspect, and this aspect that like mmm, he might not like me, or just trying to— You know, this interaction, this uncertainty, that’s kind of inherent in pursuit. And all the technology’s just as simple as like kind of, you know, you just get it.
Mason: I perhaps want to go to Dan and Ian. Is it going to be dumb AI?
Audience 5: It’s like, can a robot actually pick me up in a bar, you know?
O’Hara: You have great faith in the capacity of technology to provide what you want but I would ask you, since when have you used any piece of technology that didn’t stop working, break down, battery runs out, update fails, you’re sitting there waiting, you know… Let me not mention Apple and the kind of experiences you can get there.
In other words, machines go wrong, a lot. A hell of a lot. And there’s an artist called Cécile B. Evans I was talking with at Art Dubai earlier this year, and that talk is online, you can watch it. Cécile was resident at the Serpentine, and she made a very interesting video project of an imperfect, glitched copy—a kind of AI-type copy—of the actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The data—it wasn’t intentional, but the data she was using glitched. She got all sorts of noise in the signal. And so when she actually runs this, you’ve got this bot of Phillip Seymour Hoffman but it doesn’t…quite…behave right. Gets things wrong, gets a bit mixed up. I think in actual fact we need to start thinking about the sheer unreliability of the platform as well. Which may, by some people, be regarded as a positive, rather than a negative, if you’re looking for the unpredictable.
Mason: Will we get the full play VR, Ian?
Pearson: We have to solve that problem. But that’s an excellent point. Technology today breaks down. The body doesn’t break down in quite the same way. You might have a heart attack or a stroke or something like that, it might break down, but generally speaking our bodies are fairly…immune to that kind of provocation that crashes our today’s computers very easily.
If we get the solutions to that, and we have to get the solutions to that because we’re very vulnerable to attack by terrorist groups and rogue governments and any mad scientist that comes around in fifteen, twenty years’ time, we have to solve that as a separate problem in technology anyway. If we do, and then we have a more robust technology platform on which to base all these future things, then we can provide the things with any personality that you like. So if you want someone that’s really easy to pick up in the bar…well you know, snap your fingers and they’d come running. If you want to have a big fight over it, then it will take you weeks and weeks and weeks to chat them up because you’ve got to get to really know them before they’re even showing any interest at all. I mean, there isn’t a single form of sexbot that’s going to come along. It’ll be as diverse as humans will be, probably more diverse because you’ve got more dimensions to play with. So it’ll be whatever way you want it to be, or whichever way somebody else wants to be who wants to force them on you. So, there’s a rich diversity of sexbots coming down the road.
Mason: I mean, I find something problematic about it being what you want it to be, rather than it expressing its own…
Pearson: I think it is potentially problematic, but we face these sorts of problems every day. I mean, do you cycle to work and make yourself fit and eat salad for lunch, or do you get a car to work and have a Big Mac for lunch and sort of die twenty-five years early of a heart attack? You know, we make those sorts of trade-offs every day in life—its not a new one. We’ve always had the “do you want to do things properly in a rich human-like way, or do you just want to get into bed quickly and get your orgasm and move onto something else?”
Mason: And I think Veronica’s question to an extent was do you want the cheat code: up up left left right right triangle triangle square square, orgasm?
Pearson: There’s nothing to stop you making it as human-like as you want. You can make it as machine-like as you want. There’s a vast spectrum and you can put it anywhere on that line. And whether you buy it and have it customized or whether you buy something off the shelf that’s designed by some guy in Apple or something, that’s your free choice to do that. You can pay over the odds and get it customized exactly to your requirements, or you could just buy one from a manufacturer.
Now, what is interesting, though, is the potential manufacturers are actually very very squeamish about this. And I play with my Xbox and I’m playing this game called Skyrim. And I’ve been playing it far too long, really, but you know, every day I’m chopping people’s heads off and blood spurts everywhere. But perish the thought that I might see a nipple in that program. Microsoft are terrified of having any nudity on any of their programs. On a PC you’ll get people that will hack into it and allow you to do that. That mod community will do it, but on the pure Xbox platform they will not. We have this idea that you can have lots of blood and guts and be as nasty as you possibly want to be in a computer game, but you must never see anybody naked. And I have to wonder, we’re talking about all these sexbots and all this wonderful future that we might have, or terrible future. Will we actually have that choice, or will the Googles and the Microsofts of this world decide that it’s not in their brand’s corporate interest, and you will only be able to get it through the mod community the way you got the sex VR stuff in the early 1990s. It might be as difficult as that.
Mason: And this was the issue with GTA, but that’s a whole other video game. Sex and Violence, Kate, do you…?
Devlin: Yeah, I was just going to say it’s a long way off, having machines that are sentient, but if they were then who says they’re going to want to have sex with us? So this is just saying if you start to introducing sentience to some degree, you start looking at things like free will, autonomy, consent, all these sorts of issues as well. But again, that’s a long way off.
Mason: Robots are going to look at us and go, “No thank you.”
Devlin: Perhaps!
Mason: Random bio bits, no thank you.
Audience 6: Given Dr. Pearson just said how robots will never be as diverse as human beings, surely they would only ever be an extension of porn in that case. And also you talked about the technology advancing quickly. Is it advancing so quickly that it would overtake A, financial barriers so surely this is, at the moment the preserve of the super rich and people who can afford it; and B, the moral barriers, so at what point am I going to get to the stage where I walk down the street and see my friend who I haven’t seen for a long time and he says, “I’m dating a robot,” and I think that’s not weird?
Mason: So Nick’s my friend; I know what’s coming.
Pearson: I mean, you have a 1% or 2% geek community all the time, pushing forwards the barriers, and they will always buy the latest tech and make their own, that’ll mod whatever’s going and they will make it happen. And then very slowly afterwards the rest of society adapts and gradually the markets start appearing for buying all the other sanitized versions of that, according to what people will accept at the current date. That whole value bast that society has is on a free run. We’ve thrown religion in the bin quite some time ago, but there aren’t any really strong anchors anymore for that moral base. And things that you consider to be immoral today you might perfectly be happy with in fifteen, twenty, thirty years’ time. So, I don’t think you can preempt the discussion of what will be allowed in say 2045, 2050. A lot of that might be—
Audience 6: [inaudible sentence] You were talking earlier about we’re happy to see blood or something but not nipples, that is religion-based, because essentially we’re happy to [inaudible] draw and people before we’re happy to see nudity. But, robots do not have a bible. Or, any of the kind of religious [documents?], as far as I’m aware.
Mason: No, but there’s the [argument?] This is the reason why perhaps the East is slightly more open to the idea of robots having souls, is because there wasn’t Judeo-Christian religion to say that objects cannot have “soul” as such.
Audience 6: Living objects.
Mason: Non…um, objects.
Audience 7: I’m going to have to make a Blade Runner reference. Leaving aside the “do androids dream of electric sheep?,” which is going the wrong wrong direction, the character in Blade Runner, Pris, was described as a standard pleasure bot. Do we think that actually what we’re going to end up with is something considerably more mundane than what we’ve said here, where actually you get essentially mostly vanilla sex robots, rather than this weird spectrum of fantastic fetishes and so on? Are we going to end up with essentially standard sex, as we started with?
Barber: I mean, if you’ve got your standard sex robot, and you are a particular fetishist or you’re a sadomasochist, you will do what you want to that robot. Forget safe words, because they wont feel pain. What’s the moral issues there? And the problem is, is the rights of the robot then we’re looking at. There are ethical discussions to do with the rights of the robot. Should you have robots that will allow themselves to be beaten and caned and tied up and suspended and all this kind of stuff, just so that you can get your sadistic feelings out if you’re a sexual sadist? So it’s tricky. There have been discussions at Goldsmith’s, some quite interesting discussions about the legalities and the social rights, the consent of the robot.
Pearson: That film Blade Runner was actually a very good one in a lot of ways. I mean, Pris was an interesting basic pleasure model, but Rachael was very much more sophisticated—I think she was Nexus‑7 or something. My daughter is named after Rachael from the Blade Runner film, by the way. And she knows that too, so it won’t be a big surprise to her! But Rachael in that film is as sophisticated and passes quite happily as a human being. And she raises all sorts of moral issues and deep philosophy during that film as well. She is exactly the sort of person that you would spend time chatting up in a bar to get her to go to bed with you. You know, you would treat her pretty much the way you would another human being. And I think that’s actually quite a realistic future. The only arguable thing is which date it happens. Science fiction’s usually set a couple of decades too early, but you know, by 2050 you will have Rachael from Blade Runner.
Devlin:I would say the way things are going practically at the minute you can go and buy a sex robot now, such as the True Companion one, the Roxxxy one, for about $6,000, something like that? And they’re going to have a male version called Rocky.
But we’re also living in a time when customizability is a huge part of technology. And why shouldn’t you design your own made-to-order sexbot? I mean…would your sexbot have hair? Just as the simplest thing. Would it have two legs? How many heads would it have? You could design your own and make it. We’re moving to a making community. I don’t see why that’s something…
Mason: Right. And a thing I’m taking from thing, and coming back to Cécile’s work, who’s face would it have?
Devlin: Oh, Peter [inaudible]. Maybe.
Audience 8: Is it a problem, though, that with like Roxy, that people could design their own? Like it’s really interesting what you were saying about people designing. But because Roxxxy’s you know, been designed, she will become the most popular. And as I understand it Roxxxy has GPS to the local Nando’s? and like fast food? So what Roxxxy can [inaudible] she can tell me where to get KFC. She can tell you where to get Nando’s and Macdonald’s. She can tell you you’re fit (designed for a man), and she’s got different settings like Slutty Sadie, and Shy Sarah, who reluctantly has sex with you. So, that’s a really horrible model, right? But that’s going to be the fastest-selling new sex robot because people aren’t going to have the money and the energy. The ethics of the designers of Roxxxy 2000 are really questionable. So surely that’s why its really important that there’s some kind of society or legal intervention to make sure that we don’t just roll out Roxxxy.
Devlin: I think that’s… The interesting thing is that when you get a lot of technology you’re always going to get people who try to subvert it and customize it. And hopefully—hopefully—they will reject that in favor of doing their own. I mean, I’d really like to see that happen. But yeah, its kind of grim, the Roxxxy thing.
Barber: So will Nando’s actually have special evenings where you can take your Roxxxy robot to it if she’s got a GPS?
Audience 8: [inaudible] But like, shouldn’t we be talking about how that might be avoided?
Barber: Yeah. But, I mean are we going to sit in the local pizzeria and have people there with their robot partners?
Mason: I mean if Nando’s is your first date choice I think you’re safe with a robot.
Audience 9: I think there’s quite interesting strategy you’re bringing up there. We’re saying there is an established market, industry, advertising industry, sex industry, that behaves in a certain way with a certain set of behaviors and activities that might produce the Suzie, Sarah, Nando’s sex robot more than anything else, and what might be a good way to deal with that, and disrupt it in that kind of way. For me the alternative would be to produce an alternative. Rather than go out and say, “Look, House of Commons, rah rah rah, this is horrible for all these reasons, please legislate against it.” they’re not going to [inaudible]. But we might be able to produce and actually manufacture, and produce the means to manufacture an alternative. So, [inaudible], a lot of alternatives that we might offer.
Mason: Ben, you mean like Ian’s mention of Skyrim, you’re going to be sitting on a character creation screen for hours and hours on end…?
Audience 9: Well actually, there are some very simple pieces of technology that challenge our preconditions of sexuality. I mean, the idea that we liberate sexuality from its current social behaviors into something that is just purely pleasure-driven challenges the question “what it is like to live?” Why am I alive? Why am I doing this? And we’ve got to ask that question, and it is different.
Devlin: I think I agree, sex as being embodied, as being part of our existence, I think is a very interesting thing. And I like the idea of challenging things, that’s exactly my point with the Campaign Against Sex Robots. Instead of trying to ban things we should be exploring it instead and opening it up to much wider exploration.
Audience 9 And shouldn’t it be a campaign for sex robots?
Devlin: Mine would be. I’m not part of the Campaign Against Sex Robots—absolutely not.
Audience 10: Have any of you ever seen or read Jennifer Haley’s The Nether? It was a play, a Royal Court thing in 2014, where in a future world we can all put ourselves into pods and live as avatars on the Internet. There is part of the Internet where you can visit, have sex with and brutally murder small children. But those children are themselves played as avatars by adults, because the government had legislated as such that children themselves couldn’t experience that, but adults could put themselves into a child’s body and gain sexual pleasure from being killed or tortured as a child.
But I think the big takeaway point—I mean to me—from the play actually was more about the human impact on those people who were playing the children, or who were as an adult having sex with a child that they knew was an adult. That and the ethics of whether we should be having children robots to have sex with. The more important point was I think the emotional effect it had on those people who were playing children. And I guess my question is more about if we have the perfect woman or the perfect man or the perfect biogel to have sex with, how does that effect our own behavior, and whether there’s studies about how that is affecting our own sexual behavior with other humans.
Barber: I think mentioning the behavior with children is a specific type of fetishistic behavior, dealing with children, and it’s something to do with power. So the way you’re looking at sex and power would be a way to deal with that, but it’s slightly different than dealing with different forms of sexual pleasure because there are elements of power that go on here that I think are quite divorced from other elements of adult-to-adult sexual pleasure. So I think the ethics to do with power and childhood are something that’s quite another, different argument to be had, or discussion to be had, in terms of how we look at pedophilia, how we look at the child robot, and how we engage with our sense of sexual power over an individual. And that’s where I think that argument could take on a totally new, different, form of discussion. And I think we need to have those kinds of discussion in order to be able to help the different sort of cultures that deal with issues of child sex and power.
O’Hara: The problem is though, Trudy, isn’t it, that conversations like this are very rarely possible. And that it is precisely in art that these ideas can be explored. Because art is somehow seen as virtual in itself, as a playground, a laboratory, somewhere where the limits and taboos are kind of thrown out and we can kind of push that as far as possible, as an experiment.
It quite amuses me that we were talking about the conference being banned in Malaysia and going, “Oh…bad choice of venue,” because as somebody who’s lived outside of the UK for a very long time and only just come back, the idea of talking about sex in Britain? I would’ve thought this is just about the worst place in the world to actually try to have these conversations.
But one of the things that we can talk about—and I think it comes back to first question, almost, about definitions of sex. We’ve been talking about procreation having been subtracted. And we’ve talked about pleasure. And the one thing we haven’t talked about, as an ordinary function of sex, is communication. Nobody’s really mentioned that, and I just wanted to flag it up as something which art, which theater, explicitly foregrounds. As that example does.
Devlin: Can I actually… On that point, what you said about how does it affect our relationship with others. And I think that’s interesting. Because in terms of anyone who’s in an established, monogamous relationship, what happens if you introduce a sexual bot into that—is it infidelity? What’s the line between sex toy, and sex robot? Where does the idea of faithfulness come into it? Are you cheating on your partner if you’re using this sex robot? How much sentience does it have to have, how much autonomy does it have to have, before it becomes a third party in your monogamous relationship, for example?
Barber: As part of some sexual therapies, a surrogate sexual partner is bought in anyway as part of sexual therapy, marital relationship therapy. So maybe a sexbot might actually make that a bit more…easy, for some couples?
Devlin: Or in terms of sexual surrogacy in the case of disability, where someone is providing some kind of sexual therapy and sexual help towards somebody, perhaps.
Audience 11: We’ve kind of reached where I wanted to ask my question, really. It’s picking up from something Kate said early on about we touched on the necessity of sex as we know it, not just the mechanics but the intimacy, for our wellbeing, and for our interconnectedness. It’s clear when there’s a gulf in sexual communication and people are looking to porn and sheer sort of like, just the mechanics, the pumpings of things. Then there’s a real loneliness when it comes to intimacy because sex becomes a performance and not an interaction. And I think that leads to negative impacts on mental health in our society.
And also there were studies recently about, especially young people, overusing their iPhones, only really interacting with their screens, and that might be leading to lack of sleep, anxiety, depression. And also a lack of being able to interact with people—being social inept, not being able to be touched without thinking it’s weird. But then also, and in addition, there’s this augmented reality of Facebook, of social media, again feeding into anxiety, people looking to these sort of augmented, perfected ideals of what’s possible and then becoming anxious and having very low self-esteem.
So I guess my question is about if we’re going into sort of this sexual, robotized future where it’s man vs. octocock [inaudible phrase; laughter] So all of these perfect ideals, what’s that going to do to our mental health? How’s it going to feed into anxiety and not feeling good enough?
O’Hara: Maybe one way to approach that is to consider— And I don’t want to get all Freudian on everyone at this late point in the evening. But, consider how many of those behaviors in combination with the devices we already have are themselves libidinal relations. There’s a phrase that Mark Fisher uses about mobile phones—particularly about iPhones. He calls them “electro-libidinal parasites.” Because of the way they parasitize libidinal behaviors—the repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. And those behaviors in us are being channeled already, every day, by many things. By the world around us, by advertising, by all the devices we use. So perhaps we’re already in that world and this is maybe about redirecting it towards a more proper, full, rather than partial, object. Or not?
Devlin: In terms of technology today, the phone is a good example. Our phones are very intimate to us—we don’t tend to lend our phones to strangers. We have this attachment to this technology already, that we don’t want to share it, we keep it to ourselves. I mean I would feel slightly freaked out by the idea of giving a stranger my phone. We just don’t do it, even if they were standing there going, “I really need to call someone!” No, I don’t want to pass that over to you. So there is this attachment already to technology that we have.
Audience 12: My question is that most technology seems to either do a new thing that isn’t already provided, or do something much much better than something that already existed. And technology that doesn’t do one of those things tends to not be very successful. For example, the Apple Watch, given that we have smartphones, and watches. [laughter]
So my question is… (Smartphones have clocks on them.) What is the incentive for businesses that primarily have to mass-produce these things? A lot of the sex robots we’ve talked about are are being produced as sort of R&D stuff, not necessarily to be sold, or produced as sort of university pieces or for research, which ultimately can’t be produced in the mass sphere. What is the actual financial incentive to produce sex robots on a mass scale, that might actually be mass produced by individuals, given that all the examples we’ve had so far have been very niche people, with niece sexual preferences, who probably could not provide the huge amount of capital necessary to create a kind of artificial intelligence sex robot, given that we have things like sex toys? What is the quantifiable improvement we’d get with our kind of like Number 6 from Battlestar Galactica, given the decades of R&D that would be necessary to build that thing, and the few number of people who would want the product? Why would we actually produce sex robots?
Mason: So who’s going to build the Internet of Genitalia, Ian?
Barber: Yes.
Pearson: I think you will have a very small market of people who’re prepared to go out and buy just a sex robot. The vast majority of people will go out and buy a robot that does other things like cleaning the house or being a home butler or whatever. And then people will form relationships with those. I mean, we know people from just watching Star Wars and other science fiction, people do form relationships with pretty crude robots. As long as they’ve got some sort of a personality there you’ll form an attachment with it. And people will buy all sorts of domestic robots for all sorts of reasons, and a lot of that will be for companionship, and those companionship robots will look quite human-like in many cases. And people will have sex with them. A few people will buy their robot specifically for sex, but they’re going to be quite expensive for them to do that, I think initially, so I don’t think that market will be the dominant one, I think it will come in via the back door.
Mason: So to speak.
Audience 12 Why would you want to have sex with your serving robot when it probably wouldn’t be very good because it hasn’t been designed to have sex with you? I do like C‑3P0… [laughter; inaudible portion] I could have sex with a person, or I could use a sex toy, or lots of other opportunities that would probably be much better than having sex with let’s say C‑3P0. Why is there the incentive to make C‑3P0 better at having sex than say cooking a great omelet or something?
Pearson: The key thing there is that technology doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It doesn’t come in overnight and suddenly you’ve a robot in your house. It develops over a period of years. And during those years you’re messing around with virtual reality, you’re learning to have virtual sex with all sorts of other people, you’re starting to use machine mediation of that sex, you’re starting to make all sorts of different things which make it more likely that when you come to buy your domestic robot you will also buy one that’s attractive and probably has that sex function built into it. If you’re doing it tomorrow, you probably wouldn’t. But if you’re doing it in ten, fifteen years, time you probably would.
Audience 12 But it’s really hard to have sex that’s good. [laughter]
Mason: So Gareth, I know you. This is not therapy.
Audience 12 [inaudible] …mean like, having sex just like, rutting into something. It has to react back to you, which is a very complicated programming system.
Pearson: But it will—
Audience 12: That’s not possible.
Pearson: If you’re having sex with an AI that exists today in 2015 it’s not going to be very good. If you’re having sex with an AI which happens to be using a robot— I mean just separate the AI and the robots because they’re not quite the same thing. But your AI that you’re having sex, with via the robot, you will get to know that. You will have a very very close relationship with that AI by the time you get round to having sex with it. And the robot is just a front-end device.
Audience 12: Yeah, but there’s like movement.
Pearson: Yeah—
Mason: Kate, you look horrified.
Devlin: I was just going to say sex toys. I mean, start with sex toys. Lots of people own sex toys. Would you want one that gets better and better and learns more and more about you? The sex gets better and better with the sex toy, yes! sure, why not. I mean I would, but you know.
How far do you want to take that? That I see as an area of marketization. And if someone had said to me ten years ago would you want a phone that you were intimately linked to and that could do everything for you I’d laugh and say, “I don’t want a phone that I’m that dependent on,” but now I have one and you know, I love it to bits—emotionally attached. Same with sex toys, why not go down that route?
Mason: I can’t resist giving the last question to Ghislaine Boddington, who’s…
Ghislaine Boddington: It was actually more of a general comment. But it was a fantastic panel, really great. I just wanted to say that I think that coming back to the ethics and behaviors question, which I think is really important, and everybody knows that that’s of importance to it all. We are all aware of the sci-fi connections. But also we need to be aware how mass they are. I mean for example—we haven’t mentioned, but Humans, the recent series on television; Her, the film. These are mass discussions about the ethics and behaviors around all of this which happened long before these things come about.
So maybe we have to stay a bit optimistic. I mean I had an incredible discussion in a taxi recently about Humans with the taxi driver. This is happening everywhere, in everyone’s homes. Luckily it’s not just in here, yeah, even though this is a deeper debate and we’ve much more knowledge and expertise. So, maybe we have to believe that these debates will go deeper through the mass media exposure that’s happening too, where we explore those dystopias through those films and hopefully utopias that come out.
Mason: Well I would hope so. And let me end with this: The future is always virtual, and many things that may seem imminent never actually happen. Fortunately our ability to survive the future is not contingent on our capacity for prediction, though, sometimes on those much more rare occasions, something remarkable comes of staring the future deep in the eyes and challenging everything that it seems to promise. I hope you feel you’ve done that tonight. The bar is open. Please join me in thanking these wonderful panelists.
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Bondara is ranked in the top three online shops of its type, Bondara is a leading provider of sex toys and lingerie in the UK. The company’s diverse range of products reflect the diversity of its customers – Bondara believes in sexual wellbeing for all and prides itself on catering for all sexual tastes and preferences however unique they may be.
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The report looks at how sex will evolve with this technology. Key predictions include:
By 2030, most people will have some form of virtual sex as casually as they browse porn today
By 2035 the majority of people will own sex toys that interact with virtual reality sex
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We will start to see sex with robots be more popular than human-human sex in 2050
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Press
Future of Sex, ‘Sex Robots Will Help Human Sexuality Evolve, Agree Virtual Futures Panelists’ by Anthony Scholefield, 11 December 2015.