Farrah asks if she needs to spread her legs so that her ‘actual vagina’ is moulded, but Roberto tells her that won’t be necessary.
‘He’s very calm for his job,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t show much emotion.’
‘He’s a robot engineer,’ I shrug.
‘Right! That’s true.’
Roberto takes care around the creases of her knees to ensure that every detail will be captured. Noel snaps more pictures. After the plaster-soaked bandages have been applied it becomes uncomfortable for Farrah: the cast is heavy, and the weight of it pulls on her body. She’s hungry. But they have to wait for it to dry entirely before she can be freed from it, so Roberto tries to entertain her by taking out his phone and showing her a picture of his current prototype, Eva.
‘Oh my God,’ Farrah says. ‘That’s amazing. That looks so real. But her eyes are a little scary.’
‘I need to put her eyeballs in,’ Roberto says.
After ninety minutes, Noel and Roberto help Farrah peel herself out of the cast. They leave it face down on the floor, like an inverted, decapitated corpse. Every line on her skin, the folds of her belly button, every detail is there, in plaster, waiting to be copied in fiberglass and then reproduced in silicone. Roberto pays Farrah her $200 in cash and they make a plan for her to return, so he can cast the other side of her body, her arms, and finally her face. Everyone looks happy, no one more than Roberto. ‘When I do something, I like to do it the best,’ he beams. ‘I want that level of detail. I want it so that you can’t tell the difference between the robot and a real woman.’
* * *
Roberto knows I’ve come to Las Vegas to meet his robot, but Eva the Android Love Doll isn’t at the studio today: she’s in his workshop, which is the garage of the home he shares with Noel and their mother, in a gated community in the suburbs, twenty minutes’ drive away. He brushes away the dog hair and plaster body parts to make room for me on the back seat of his car. Then he tells me how the robot has taken over his life.
‘I have breakfast and a bath and then I work on the robot from eight until one. I go to work at the pharmacy until seven and then I come back and do a little more on the robot or the website. Right now, I’m working on the skeleton. For most of last week I was putting new, more powerful motors in the legs; the old ones were too weak. I work on it every day.’
Roberto is only in the US because his mother literally won the right to be here. In the 1990s, Cubans who qualified for refugee status could enter a lottery and win US citizenship for themselves and their families. She came over with Noel in 2000, while Roberto stayed in Cuba to take care of their grandmother, joining them after she died in 2006. ‘In Cuba, people are hungry for technology,’ he says. ‘That’s why I want to use technology to help people’s lives.’ He arrived in the US fuelled by American dreams of becoming a self-made entrepreneur, a rags-to-riches success. When he read a 2016 Fortune magazine article that predicted spending on robotics would hit $135.4 billion by 2019, he knew he had found his calling. ‘I’ve always been interested in robotics. This is my passion. I love this. I love my job.’
He tells me his goal is to make fully functional humanoids that can model clothes and work the tills in the retail industry, show hotel guests to their rooms in the hospitality industry, and do domestic chores and look after the sick and elderly in the care industry. He’s starting with sex robots because they are simpler. ‘The movements are easier to do. A fully functional android robot would take a couple of years to finish – a sex robot is accessible now. It’s the fastest way to achieve my goal.’
The whole family has bought into his dream: there’s Noel, of course, in marketing and communications, plus their uncle, who helps Roberto in the workshop at weekends, but there’s also their cousin, who’s a year away from completing a PhD in cybernetics and is helping with some of the engineering. Roberto gets everything else he needs from Google, or YouTube, or Amazon. ‘Mostly, I self-learn. I read books. It keeps me really busy.’ The family has so far invested $20,000 of their savings into Roberto’s prototypes.
‘We’re going to make it so her eyes can follow you. People in the doll community want warm skin, so I’m going to try and invent some sensors in the skin to raise the temperature – silicone can burn really fast, so I’m trying to see how I can do that safely. Some people have also said they want the doll to self-lubricate – I’m working on that. We are also interested in incorporating virtual reality technologies, so couples in long distance relationships can control the doll with their movements. We want her to have real relationships with people.’
Roberto sounds far more interested in developing the physical side of his robot than the companionship side of things. The AI – the possibility of having a relationship – is something he’ll get to once he’s cracked the animatronics. He tells me his ultimate goal is to build a robot that will walk up and knock on his customer’s door. ‘Self-delivery.’
Of course, Roberto has heard rumours about the work going on in Abyss Creations’ RealBotix room, and the sex doll manufacturers in East Asia who are experimenting with animatronics. But he hopes that if he can beat them all and be the first to produce a sex robot that can put herself into sexual positions, he’ll have the commercial edge. ‘For full body movement, I’m pretty much one of the first ones,’ he says. He’s also undercutting his rivals on price: his robots will cost $8,000 to $10,000, and five customers have already paid for theirs in advance.
By the time we drive into the compound and pull up outside Roberto’s garage, Eva has had quite a build-up. He flicks the switch to pull up the garage door to reveal his workshop, and it feels like a curtain is being very slowly lifted.
Eva, the robot he claims can put herself into over twenty different sex positions, the robot he says can crawl and moan and has fully functional AI, the robot he told me was ‘ready twenty-four seven’, is lying headless and footless on a trestle table at the back of the garage. Her metal skeleton is clearly visible under her silicone skin, which has thick, jagged seams. It looks like a mess.
‘Let me just get the head,’ Roberto says, shuffling inside the house, with Noel a few paces behind.
The workshop is a monument to Roberto’s obsession. Another headless silicone body reclines on a mattress in the corner. The yard next to it is filled with shop mannequins, torsos, a pair of legs with purple painted toenails, and a large cardboard box filled with plaster casts of human heads. The garage floor is carpeted with Newport cigarette butts smoked down to the filter.
The brothers re-emerge from the house with the blank-faced head in a brown wig that I recognize from the website, some itchy-looking thick black stockings and crotchless white panties bedecked with pink bows. Roberto dresses Eva with fumbling hands, screws the head onto the neck and plugs it into a laptop resting on a battered leather chair. But Eva is not going to perform for me today. Roberto tinkers, reboots and rewires, but her sound files won’t load, he says, and her new limbs are too heavy for the existing servomotors, so she can barely move. Her joints wheeze as he tries to get her to bend her legs.
‘It’s all trial and error, at this stage,’ he shrugs, without any embarrassment at all. ‘She’s a prototype.’
Roberto has complete faith that his robot will exist one day. He is determined to make his dream a reality, to prove to his family that their belief in him, that their investment in him, is justified.
‘Do you have any worries about making a robot like this?’ I ask him.
‘No, not really. It’s a technology that’s moving forward, and pretty soon robotics and technology will be more and more in our daily lives. It will help people to become more sociable.’
‘So it’s perfectly healthy to want to own a robot you have sex with?’
Noel the marketing man senses a change in tone and steps in.
‘Women experience things like rape and abuse and things like that,’ he says solemnly. ‘This is definitely something that could help people move away from that, so
they are not so angry with their wives: they can be angry at this, and beat this, and that should be fine –’ he throws open his arms – ‘because it will not feel a thing, we promise!’
The brothers laugh, open-mouthed, delighted with the joke. But Noel isn’t really joking.
‘Hold on a second,’ I say. ‘Surely people like that should be encouraged not to have those feelings at all, rather than being given something to rape and beat.’
‘Yeah,’ nods Noel. ‘These things will help them, calm them down, and act as a safeguard between anything that they want to do and anything they will do.’
I leave Roberto and Noel just as their mother, Marilyn, is arriving home from work. She wears a large crucifix on a thin chain around her neck. I’m desperate to know what she thinks about her son’s project.
‘I think there’s a genius in my garage. Like the Apple person – Steve Jobs – I saw the movie,’ she says warmly, her face flushed with joy. ‘He has a great idea and he concentrates hard on the job. I told him that he can reach for the stars. The sky isn’t far for him.’
‘You seem so proud,’ I say.
‘He’s very capable of achieving his goal. He’s an intelligent boy.’ She puts her hand to her heart. ‘He’s my son.’
I head back to my hotel as the reassuring cloak of darkness falls on Las Vegas. I’m exhausted. Music is thumping out of huge speakers mounted on the building’s exterior: throbbing, pounding beats that are supposed to entice gamblers into the hotel’s casino. I swipe my key card and flop down on the giant bed. On the bedside table, there’s a metal dish full of individually wrapped pairs of earplugs: wax ones, foam ones, silicone ones – a profusion of solutions supplied by the management to the noise pollution problem caused by the management. They could just switch the music off, of course, but they have provided a little piece of technology instead so they don’t have to.
My head is full of Eva, who has the body of a real woman, but can be beaten without feeling a thing. Rather than dealing with the cause of a problem, we invent something to try to cancel it out.
* * *
Sex robots are coming onto the market during a time of turmoil for men around the world, when they are losing their power, their status, their certainties. The sexual revolution and second-wave feminism of the 1960s have meant that today, in the West at least, women grow up knowing they can and should choose who they sleep with. They are no longer viewed as the property of fathers, passed down to husbands. They feel entitled to fulfilling relationships, and are less willing than ever to stick things out when they are not good.
Some men have found this reimagining of women as sentient beings with desires and choices very inconvenient; it has left them without access to sex, and it’s made them very angry.
‘Incels’ are the self-proclaimed involuntarily celibate. Although some women have identified as incel, the term has been overwhelmingly adopted by heterosexual men, who believe they are entitled to sex with desirable women whenever they want it, and loathe women for denying it to them. They think women should be easier, at the same time as being disgusted by how easy they are. Their special brand of misogyny despises women for refusing to have sex with them, without considering that the reason women don’t want sex with them is not because they are not rich or good looking enough, but because they are misogynists.
In their online message boards, incels say that women use their sexual power over men to tyrannize them. They describe themselves as a marginalized group fighting for their right to sex in the face of terrible injustice, just as black people are fighting for their right not to be killed by police officers. I’ve read posts where they lament how women are ‘worshipped’ when they are only ‘cum-dumpsters’, how they need to be murdered, stalked and ‘raped in the eye sockets’. It would be easy to dismiss this as simply the online rantings of a few desperate losers, but there is a worryingly large number of them. When Reddit shut down its online incel community for glorifying rape and violence against women in November 2017, the incel subreddit had 40,000 members – that’s members, people actively contributing to the message boards; it doesn’t include the people who lurk and read the page without signing in – and it was only one of scores of similar communities online.
And incels aren’t just hiding behind their computers: they are radicalizing one another and committing mass murder. At least sixteen people have been killed by men happy to describe themselves as incels. In 2014, in Isla Vista, California, Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured fourteen others before killing himself. Shortly before the attack, he uploaded a YouTube video in which he told the camera, ‘I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.’ Four years later, Alek Minassian drove a van into a crowd of people in Toronto, killing ten and injuring sixteen, just after posting on Facebook that ‘The Incel Rebellion has already begun!’ Many more have died at the hands of men who said they were motivated by sexual frustration – like the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, who killed thirty-two people in 2007, and Christopher Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people in Oregon in 2015.
So sexually frustrated men can be dangerous. And it’s not just Noel who thinks sex robots can be the solution; think pieces from the New York Times to the Spectator have suggested that, in the future, sex robots will be used to defuse and pacify the involuntarily celibate before they can do any harm to humans. The argument goes that sex robots will allow for a kind of ‘sexual redistribution’ which will mean the right to sex can become an attainable human right, and that life will no longer seem so terribly unfair for men who can’t get laid.
But sex robots are more likely to be a symptom of the problem than a cure for it. They have been developed at the same time as both incel culture and deepfaked pornography, where faces (of celebrities, or ex-partners, or anyone, regardless of whether they consent) are superimposed into porn videos. It is not enough for porn to exist for free, in our pockets, whenever we want it; some men want the precise porn they’d like to see, even if their desired actors don’t want to make it. Deepfakes allow anyone to be made into a pornographic spectacle without them knowing or feeling a thing.
To an even greater degree, sex robots can offer total control for the men who want it most, the chance to have a partner without autonomy, a partner they can dominate completely, stripped of the inconvenience of her own desires and free will. A partner who is built like a porn star, but will never gag, vomit or cry. For these men, this would be an upgrade on a real woman. Sex robots who never say no will feed this kind of desire, not extinguish it.
There are manufacturers in China and Japan who have no qualms about producing child sex dolls. They argue that giving men who are attracted to children a synthetic substitute will stop them from abusing real children. Men across Europe and North America have been arrested for trying to bring them into their countries (in the UK, our archaic laws mean that it’s the importation of child sex dolls that is illegal, rather than the use of them). Whenever they make the news, there’s almost universal disgust that child sex dolls could ever exist. A few tenacious academics have speculated about whether owning a child doll could stop paedophiles from acting on their impulses, as if they could be a kind of substitute for children in the way that methadone is for opiates. But the general consensus seems to be that there is no safe way for paedophiles to act on their urges – that, instead of sating their desires, child sex dolls would feed them.
None of the people racing to release the world’s first sex robot is trying to market a child model, not even Douglas, whose ‘Young Yoko’ version of Roxxxy True Companion is so carefully described as ‘barely’ over eighteen. But if child sex dolls are taboo because they could encourage illegal, damaging and abusive behaviour, how would allowing men to act out their darkest fantasies on female robots be any different? If the existence of child dolls could harm real children, how can we be confident that female sex robots pose no danger for real women?
Of course, the ‘manosp
here’ of extreme male rights communities online loves the idea of sex robots. We will hear plenty more from them when we look at the future of birth, but, for now, forgive me for reproducing a few comments in full from mgtow.com, the site for Men Going Their Own Way, complete with faux-virtuous censored obscenity and original punctuation and syntax:
Time to replace these c~~~s with robots !
The end of thousands of years of female c~~~ dictatorship
In the Book of Genesis God created woman and promised us her as a ‘help-mate’. Someone to help us, obey us, someone warm, caring, supportive and empathetic… Well we didn’t get it–did we? instead His creation has been corrupted to the point that it is anything but what it was suppose to be. (women) So, we shall make our own help-mate and then we will finally have the companion promised to us by God.
The comments on this particular thread were in response to a news article about Dr Sergi Santos, the Spanish engineer based in another garage workshop, six thousand miles away from Roberto’s, in Rubi, just outside Barcelona, Spain. Sergi is the fourth person I have found to lay claim to having invented the world’s first sex robot, but unlike Matt, Roberto or Douglas, his robot began life as an academic project, an experiment in machine learning which he documented in a paper for the International Robotics & Automation Journal entitled ‘The Samantha Project: a Modular Architecture for Modeling Transitions in Human Emotions’. He has a PhD in nanosciences – the study of the properties of tiny particles – but has spent the last four years working on a model for an artificial theory of mind.
Sergi only planned to design a brain at first, but when he was looking for a credible body in which to house it so that humans would interact with it authentically, his wife, Maritsa Kissamitaki, stumbled upon the world of hyperrealistic sex dolls. Sergi spent $50,000 buying ten from around the world, including a RealDoll and several cheaper Chinese models, and turned them into robots, adding a microphone, speakers, an internal computer and touch sensors so the doll could respond to human touch and learn from human interaction. He called her Samantha because the name means ‘the listener’ in Aramaic.
Sex Robots and Vegan Meat Page 6