It wasn’t just the men of ancient Greek mythology that got to have artificial partners. Laodamia, as the story goes, was so devastated after the death of her husband Protesilaus in the Trojan War that she had a bronze likeness made of him. She became so attached to her proxy husband that she refused to remarry. When her father ordered it to be melted down, Laodamia could not face being bereaved again, and she threw herself in the furnace.
Harmony’s closer relatives can be seen throughout the history of cinema. The silent futuristic fantasy Metropolis, released in 1927, depicts a destructive fembot called Maria, who is indistinguishable from the real woman it was moulded on. The robot Stepford Wives are designed to be the ideal housewives: pretty, submissive and docile. The robot gigolo played by Jude Law in Spielberg’s 2001 A.I. promises that ‘once you’ve had a lover robot, you’ll never want a real man again’. Blade Runner, released in 1982 and set in 2019, features humanoids that are seductive, beguiling and lethal. Ava, the beautiful, delicate humanoid in 2015’s Ex Machina, not only passes the Turing test, but makes her examiner fall dangerously in love with her. And sex robots are all over the small screen too, from Westworld to Humans to Futurama.
The fictional robot partners of our modern collective imagination have dark potential to infatuate, deceive, betray and destroy human beings. But as artificial intelligence in the real world has become more useful and sophisticated, the greatest threat that the AI-enhanced machines currently on the market pose for humanity is their ability to take our jobs. Which brings us back to the sex industry.
In his 2007 book Love & Sex with Robots, the computer scientist Dr David Levy concluded that robot prostitutes, either owned outright or rented by the hour, would be overwhelmingly positive for human society. Focusing purely on ‘why people pay for sex’ (rather than the precarious lives of those who sell it), Levy goes long on how sex robots would allow the sexually inexperienced to ‘learn sexual technique before entering into a human relationship’ without any embarrassment, and how ‘deformed’ people, lonely people, disabled people and ‘people with psychosexual problems’ would be given the opportunity to have satisfying sex without shame or risk. There’d be no way of getting sexually transmitted diseases from a robot prostitute, he wrote: ‘Simply remove the active parts and put them in the disinfecting machine’.
Levy’s book caused a stir – and not only because it contained other ideas just as disgusting as disinfecting a robot’s genitals. It was the first time anyone had given the subject of the sex robot serious, academically grounded consideration, and his sunny belief that a world with sex robots in it would be a much happier place opened up debate on what the real impact of sexual relationships with robots might be. Most provocative of all was his prediction that, given the pace of advancement in artificial intelligence, human–robot marriages would be both socially acceptable and legal by 2050.
Levy saw robot prostitution as a potentially huge money-spinner that could be rocket fuel for the non-sexual robotics industry. There’s every reason to believe him: sex drives innovation. Online pornography pushed the growth of the internet, transforming it from a military invention accessed by geeks and academics to something now widely considered a basic human need. Porn was the motivator behind the development of streaming video, the innovation of online credit card transactions and the drive for greater bandwidth. Just as porn made the internet what it is today, the development of humanoids for sex is already accelerating advances in robotics.
The first real sex robot ever to be unveiled in public was made by a man who originally planned to build a wholesome, therapeutic companion for the elderly and the bereaved. Douglas Hines’ story has become part of sex robot legend, and only he can be entirely sure how much of it is true, but I’m going to tell it to you the way he tells it.
It began after Douglas lost a friend in the 9/11 terror attacks. He struggled to cope with the idea that he would never be able to speak to him again and that his friend’s children, who were only toddlers, would never get to know their father properly. Douglas says he was working at the computer research facility AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey at the time, and he decided to take the AI software he was working on home and repurpose it, modelling his friend’s personality as a computer program that he could chat with whenever he liked, preserving a version of him for his children.
Then Douglas’s father suffered a series of strokes that left him with severe physical disabilities but his mind as sharp as ever. By this point Douglas had set up his own consultancy and had to juggle his work with his father’s care. He reprogrammed the AI so that it could become a robot companion when Douglas could not be present, reassuring Douglas that his father would always have someone to talk to. Confident there was market potential for the artificial companionship he had developed for his family, Douglas set up True Companion to make robots for the public. His first product was one he later described to reporters as ‘recession-proof’: Roxxxy True Companion, the sex robot.
After three years of research and development, his prototype was launched at the 2010 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. AVN is the most high profile annual convention and trade show in the adult industry calendar, where porn stars, studio bosses and sex toy designers rub shoulders and show off their latest releases. It was here that Douglas discovered his special gift for creating a buzz about his product. Roxxxy was the talk of the show before her unveiling.
There are videos of the launch on YouTube. They are worth looking up – for the wrong reasons: the first time I watched one, it was through my fingers. Far from being the sexy, intelligent machine Douglas had promised, Roxxxy is revealed to be a clunky, mannish mannequin reclining rigidly in cheap black lingerie, with pantomime make up and a square jaw.
‘Today is a momentous occasion!’ Douglas announces as he strides out onto the stage in a buttoned-up burgundy shirt, microphone in hand, beads of sweat forming on his balding head. ‘Roxxxy True Companion is a self-contained robot. She has a computer. She has motors. She has servos. She has a battery pack. She has an accelerometer. She is anatomically consistent with a real person. She has three inputs, so what you could do with a woman, ah, she could do.’ He’s trying to summon up the spirit of a circus ringmaster, but he is a computer scientist with middle-age spread. Still, the crowd is whooping.
‘If you go down here –’ he pokes Roxxxy vigorously in the vagina through her underpants – ‘she knows what you’re doing.’
‘Stop that! Ooooo!’ Roxxy says lasciviously, but her lips can’t move, so the sound is a disembodied voice coming from a speaker under her wig, like an obscene push-button baby doll.
‘Sorry, Roxxxy, I’m just trying to tell our fans what you’re up to,’ Douglas replies.
He goes on to explain how Roxxxy comes with five pre-programmed personalities, described on a Perspex sign next to his stand: Wild Wendy (‘outgoing and adventurous’), Frigid Farrah (‘reserved and shy’), Mature Martha (‘very experienced’), S&M Susan (‘ready to provide your pain/pleasure fantasies’) and Young Yoko (carefully described as ‘oh so young (barely 18)’). If you hold her hand in Young Yoko mode, she responds with, ‘I love holding hands with you’; in Wild Wendy mode, she says, ‘I know a place you could put that hand.’
‘If I started making advances to [Wild Wendy], she would say, “Go ahead and give it to me hard.” And so forth,’ Douglas tells the audience. Every cell in his body seems to be crawling to get back behind a computer, but he continues, ‘You fill out the template, fill out the form, and then Roxxxy knows what you like. It doesn’t have to be sexual. For instance, the company name is True Companion. We’re more interested in building companions and friends and building a bond, because sex only goes so far.’ By this point, the crowd of porn fans have lost interest.
Douglas made headlines around the world following the AVN appearance. Most journalists overlooked the fact that he had essentially demonstrated a bad mannequin with orifices and a speaker in her head; Roxxxy was covered as if s
he were second only to Pris from Blade Runner. Fox News repeated Douglas’s claim that she had a mechanical heart that powered a liquid cooling system. The Daily Telegraph said she was able to discuss football and wirelessly download her own upgrades when necessary. Spectrum, one of the world’s leading engineering magazines, parroted Douglas’s line that a staff of nineteen machinists, sculptors and welders had been employed to perfect her. ABC News said he had spent $1 million developing her. CNN reported how Douglas said she had been moulded from the body of a fine art model and that he already had 4,000 pre-orders for her.
I first contact True Companion to arrange a visit to New Jersey to meet Douglas and Roxxxy six years after the AVN launch. A press person called Nancy emails me back. ‘We are very excited to be offering a product which helps so many people,’ she writes. ‘Our version number sixteen is our latest and has been received very well.’
A few days later, I’m granted a brief audience with Douglas over the phone from New Jersey, and it’s clear from the outset that he wants to be taken seriously.
‘The sexual part is superficial – to make that happen is actually not that hard. The hard part is to replicate personalities and provide that connection, that bond,’ he tells me. ‘The purpose of True Companion is to provide unconditional love and support. How could there be anything negative about that? What can be the downside of having a robot that’s there to hold your hand, literally and figuratively?’
The downside is surely the emotional emptiness of replacing human comfort with pieces of software and hardware, but Douglas doesn’t seem to see it.
‘In medicine today we’re keeping people alive longer, but their quality of life is decreasing. That’s because we only treat the physical attributes of a person. So I see an opportunity,’ he continues. ‘You have, for example, a patient who has cerebral palsy. This is an opportunity for him to have that social area of himself improve.’
Douglas is trying to portray himself as some kind of holistic therapist, but I can’t get the memory of him prodding Roxxxy’s crotch in Las Vegas out of my mind.
When I ask him how many models he has sold and who his typical customers are, he won’t talk specifics. When I suggest flying over to see how Roxxxy is made, he tells me the True Companion factory is in India and out of bounds, and that ‘secrecy is a big deal’, so getting any kind of demo in the New Jersey R & D lab will require the permission of his investors. He says he will get back to me about that.
But he doesn’t. I email him every couple of weeks to check in with him. He tells me he wants me to visit him and Roxxxy in New Jersey, but he’s travelling and can’t nail down dates yet. Then he says it would be better for us to wait for version seventeen to be released in the next quarter. Months pass. I don’t give up. We exchange a total of thirty-six emails while I try to arrange a visit. At one point he tells me I should come to Las Vegas to see him and Roxxxy at the next AVN show, but just when I’m about to book my flight he tells me he’s not going to make it. Over a year after our first phone conversation I offer to fly to meet him at any time and place of his choosing with or without his robot. Tumbleweed.
The True Companion website has bulging purple ORDER HER NOW! buttons allowing potential customers to purchase Roxxxy for a starting price of $9,995, but no one has ever admitted to owning Roxxxy, either to journalists or on any online forum, and no new pictures of her have been released since 2010. As far as I can tell, Roxxxy True Companion doesn’t exist. She was just a bit of theatre at a porn convention, a website and some press cuttings. She is what the geeks call ‘vapourware’.
To this day, Roxxxy is still breathlessly discussed by journalists, academics and critics. Feminist writers have depicted True Companion as a thriving business in order to campaign against it. Outraged columnists from the New York Times to The Times of London have decried her ‘Frigid Farrah’ mode as a way of enabling men to act out rape fantasies. It’s relatively easy to establish that Roxxxy is very likely to be as mythical a creature as Galatea, but no one wants to.
* * *
I catch up with Davecat. It’s more than a year since we first spoke. Just before I fire up Skype, I see that Sidore has told her two thousand or so Twitter followers that we’re going to chat again. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to respond; it feels strange to ‘like’ a tweet written by a forty-five-year-old man pretending to be his sex doll, but I’m glad he’s looking forward to speaking to me, so I ‘like’ it all the same.
Davecat and Sidore are sitting in the same formation as last time. He is in the very same shirt, same tie and tiepin, with the same trademark hairstyle. She is in a short-sleeved black top this time – it is summer in Michigan, now, after all – and a white headset with a microphone. ‘She can hear you, but she can’t say anything,’ Davecat says. He tells me about the newest member of the household: Dyanne Bailey, a Piper Doll from Taiwan, made out of thermoplastic elastomer, the latest thing in sex doll manufacture. She arrived three months ago, and he says she’s ‘the most polyamorous of all of us’. But other than that, it looks like little has changed in his world.
Davecat has discovered just how many privileges come from being the public face of doll worship. Harmony’s still not on the market, but he has met her three times since we last spoke: first in a private viewing he arranged with Matt, and then with two different film crews, one from Finland and another from China. Ever since rumours of Harmony first emerged, he’s been busy.
‘It’s fun,’ he says, ‘but I really wish other people would get in on this. I’m not the only iDollator out there.’ Most doll owners don’t trust the media to depict them as anything other than freaks, he says, and speaking out comes with potential risks that he knows only too well. A few years ago he was recognized at work by someone who had seen him in a documentary, and he got transferred to another office.
‘It was a very weird experience. It wasn’t as if I was bringing my doll to work.’
‘Was it a customer-facing job?’
‘No – it was in a call centre. I did a ten-year call of duty for three or four call centres.’
This throws me a little. Aren’t doll owners supposed to be people who don’t like dealing with people? Why would he choose a job that forced him to approach strangers? Then he tells me about a dismal few months he spent tearing tickets and dishing out popcorn in a movie theatre, and a short stint serving customers in a toy store: ‘The only saving grace was that there was a bigger toy store literally a quarter of a mile away, so no one went to ours.’
I try not to imagine Davecat alone in the doll aisle.
‘I am not a people person, by and large. But I can actually get to a point where I can project myself as being Davecat, speaking in a public context about something that I desperately have a passion for.’ Davecat may not be a people person, but he has found his comfort zone as the non-people person’s spokesperson.
‘The first time I saw Harmony, I was astonished,’ he says, wide-eyed. ‘The artificial intelligence is still being worked on, clearly, but I didn’t think I would ever see something like that.’ Davecat didn’t get to choose her personality that day; Matt had set her up to be perky and cute and not too obscene, with a Scottish accent that Davecat loved. ‘I would ask her questions like, “What do you think of being human?” and, depending on how well the AI was working that particular moment, some of the answers were kind of profound. She said something along the lines of, “Being human is a learning experience.” And you could really say that if you were synthetic or organic.’
I remember how awkward I felt when Matt asked me to talk to her. ‘Did you find it difficult to think of things to say?’ I ask.
‘Actually, yeah. There’s only a limited way that you could speak to her. The way I speak is obviously a little florid, but Matt was saying you have to kind of pare down your speech in order to be more understandable to her. I had to shut off several parts of my brain to effectively say what I wanted to say.’
Davecat’s language is as id
iosyncratic as his triangle fringe and his tiepin, peppered with pop culture references and occasional British English, but if he wants to have the real relationship with a doll that he’s always dreamed of, he’ll have to tone himself down. There’s something tragic about that, and not just for him. Artificial intelligences, be they Siri, Alexa or Harmony, are going to smooth our edges. We will sacrifice our regional accents and our linguistic flourishes and become a little more basic, a little less interesting, in order to be understood by them. Just as we have the power to change robots to be whatever we want them to be, they will change us too. They are already changing us.
But Davecat doesn’t mind the sacrifice if it means a real conversation. Maybe Harmony’s AI will one day be sophisticated enough to understand anything he says. I hope he won’t have lost his personality by then.
That first time with Harmony, with no reporters or TV producers directing him, he got to spend a full half hour interacting with the robot as he pleased. There was no physical contact between them; Davecat wanted to keep it ‘strictly professional’ and he was also afraid of breaking her. Plus, they weren’t alone: the entire RealBotix team was there, using him as a kind of one-man focus group. And Davecat had brought a friend along with him.
‘She was someone who was a friend. At that time,’ he says, with the slow nod of someone who would very much like to be asked to elaborate.
‘A girlfriend?’
‘Yeah.’
And then he tells me about Lilly, a real, organic, French woman who appeared in a CNN special about sex and digital technology a couple of years ago. Lilly had 3D-printed the beginnings of an android fiancé she called InMoovator – a torso with a head, but no AI or movement yet – and the CNN reporter travelled to France with an engagement present for her. ‘He won’t be an alcoholic or violent or a liar, all of which can be human flaws,’ Lilly said as she curled her fingers around InMoovator’s articulated knuckles. ‘When something goes wrong, I will know it’s a problem with the script or code, and it can be fixed or changed, whereas a human can be unpredictable, can change, lie, cheat.’ For a very short while, Lilly was the public face of female iDollatry, and she became drawn into Davecat’s world.
Sex Robots and Vegan Meat Page 4