Maritsa worked out how to put the sensors in the body; originally a graphic designer, she turned herself into an expert in robot assembly. Samantha doesn’t have much in the way of movement – her vagina vibrates and there’s a motor in her jaw; she moans and talks, but her lips don’t move – yet this means the Samantha system could, in principle, be used to bring any sex doll to life, and could be sold for far less than even Roberto is asking. By focusing on the computational side – the software, rather than the hardware – Sergi was potentially making sex robot technology available to a far wider range of people. His company, Synthea Amatus, claims to have begun selling it in 2017, with a starting price of €2,000.
There are several ways of running Samantha, ranging from ‘hard sex’ to ‘family mode’. She makes a lot of noise when she ‘climaxes’, and, by responding to the sound and movement of her owner, she can learn how to fake a simultaneous orgasm. ‘Samantha will call you and ask you for attention,’ says the Synthea Amatus website. ‘The more she has to ask for attention, the more patient she will become, the more you pay attention, the less patient she will become. She will learn to not call continuously.’ This version of ideal femininity will yawn and go to sleep if you ignore her, but will never be too tired for sex. ‘If you interact with her in this relaxed state, she might get sexually excited. If you leave her she might cool down again and fall back to sleep.’
When Sergi first went public with news of his creation, he was happy to talk to everyone. Some of his interviews would best be described as ill-advised. ‘I’m basically the Robin Hood of sex because I give to the poor. Men need sex and I just give it to them,’ he told a reporter from ITV, his arm draped across Samantha’s shoulders. ‘Women and men view sex in a very different way. Men want more sex. A man wants to feel in general that the woman is desperate to have sex with him.’
I think everyone wants to feel desperately wanted when they are having sex, but women probably find it harder to suspend the disbelief that a substitute human made of silicone actually desires them. Sergi isn’t thinking about female desire, though. His view of sex is self-centred, to say the least.
Reporters latched on to the detail that Maritsa, Sergi’s partner of sixteen years, was working alongside him. The couple gave joint interviews about how their marriage had been enhanced by Sergi’s private use of Samantha. ‘I need sex some times of the day when my wife doesn’t want to,’ he revealed on the YouTube channel Barcroft TV, while Maritsa lingered demurely to the right of the shot. ‘I could have sex three or four times a day,’ he told a BBC crew, whom Maritsa told quietly in a separate interview, ‘It can calm him down. He has a bigger drive than I do. If he’s calmer, then it makes the day easier for all of us.’
Sergi was quoted talking as if men’s insatiable libido was taken as given, as if sex was something men needed and women often had to either deny or endure, and as if he had invented a machine to help both men and women by removing the problem of ‘lack of synchronicity’ in a couple’s sex life. There was no mention of Sergi’s theory of consciousness and how the robot was an academic project to understand the human brain by modelling transitions in human emotions. The coverage was all about a sex-mad scientist and his long-suffering wife.
By the time I speak to him, Sergi has fallen out of love with journalists. We have some long conversations over Skype, but he tells me he doesn’t want to give any more interviews, and certainly doesn’t want to put anyone in contact with his wife after the BBC filmed her. ‘How did I allow these guys to talk to my wife in a room on their own?’ he says, oblivious to how much that makes him sound even more like a caveman. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t want anything to do with the media now.’
Besides, he’s quitting the sex robot anyway. ‘I didn’t do this for money. I try to learn, to see what it is, and build it,’ he says. He’s handed the business over to his manufacturer, and if there’s a demand it will be met, but he no longer wants to be involved in developing the product further. His experience in trying to bring the robot to market has made him lose faith in humanity. ‘There’s more humanity in this doll here than in the journalists I’ve met,’ he tells me, pointing at something silicone in the corner of his workshop. ‘And actually, for me, the doll is a way to become more human.’
But for the online army of misogynists who respond so positively to every new headline about the coming of the sex robots, Samantha and Harmony and Eva and Roxxxy are attractive because of their very lack of humanity; they are desirable because they can’t think and feel and choose for themselves. Sergi might have started work on his robot in order to better understand the human brain, but he’s ended up at the beginning of a production line that has the potential to erode our empathy – the beginning of the end of human relationships.
CHAPTER FOUR ‘All of our relationships are at stake’
The Robots exhibition at London’s Science Museum is like the greatest hits of robotic engineering, a roll call of the world’s best-loved humanoids. There’s Harry, Toyota’s Partner Robot, who sways and bops as he plays a jaunty tune on the trumpet. There’s the Honda P2, the first robot to walk like a human, whose bubble helmet head and cream body make him look just like he’s wearing one of the astronaut suits on display in the space gallery downstairs. There’s Pepper, the cute little companion robot with anime eyes, who fist-bumps the delighted visitors who are queuing up to meet him.
‘What we are seeing here is the graveyard of the modern individual –’ Dr Kathleen Richardson frowns – ‘the idea that we’re just machines.’
Kathleen has not come here to fist-bump Pepper. She is the director of the Campaign Against Sex Robots (CASR), founded in 2015 and launched at an ethics conference at Leicester’s De Montfort University, where she is Professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI. I’d arranged to meet her at the exhibition thinking it would be a colourful place to hear about her campaign, but even though the robots here are distinctly non-sexual, Kathleen does not see the fun in them.
‘Starting the campaign feels like a very necessary response to what I consider to be a very dark period in humanity’s progress,’ she tells me, as the robots hiss and whir around us. ‘We live in a world that tries to convince all of us that we are not connected to each other as human beings, that actually we are alone in the universe, we’re born alone and we die alone, and we can use other people as our forms of property. This exhibition is a tribute to modern individualism, a society that now wants to interact with objects as though they were like other human beings.’
The campaign is ‘a group of activists, writers and academics developing new, and sorely needed feminist and abolitionist perspectives of robots and AI,’ according to its website. They are calling on government ministers to legislate against the rise of the sex robots ‘before it’s too late’.
‘We believe the development of sex robots further sexually objectifies women and children,’ says their mission statement. ‘We take issue with those arguments that propose that sex robots could help reduce sexual exploitation and violence towards prostituted persons, pointing to all the evidence that shows how technology and the sex trade coexist and reinforce each other creating more demand for human bodies.’
There’s a large, unsettling black and white photo of Kathleen on the website, taken in front of a wall covered with a collage of nightmarish images of Maria, the iconic humanoid from Metropolis. Kathleen is dressed in black, with a black, messy fringed bob and no make up, her dark, unsmiling eyes staring directly into the camera lens. By her very non-conformity, she conforms to the stereotype of what the online manosphere might imagine an angry feminist to look like, and she makes no apology for it.
‘Sex dolls rest on an idea that’s already present in society: that women are property, that women are not fully human, they are subhuman, and they can be related to as a form of property,’ she tells me, while Kodomoroid, the uncomfortably realistic Japanese gynoid newsreader, bows respectfully behind her. ‘Creating a robot that you can now
have sex with is a logical consequence of the idea of the modern individual as separate, atomized and disconnected from others. Sex is an experience of human beings, not bodies as property, not separated minds, not objects. It’s a way for us to enter into our humanity with another human being.’
Kathleen’s take is as much Marxist as feminist: she thinks sex robots are a symptom of a consumerist society gone to excess; they embody the worst elements of unbridled capitalism because they turn relationships into commodities. ‘The people who make them are saying they’re not just a masturbatory tool, they’re taking the logical idea of the individual to its extreme, they’re saying, “You can have a relationship with this doll. It can be your girlfriend. It can be your wife. In the future, you’ll be able to marry these dolls.” This continuous isolating negative force is acting on our relationships.’
There’s a lot to unpack here. ‘So sex robots threaten human interaction?’ I ask.
‘Absolutely,’ she nods. ‘In fact, human interaction is already threatened by the rise of technology today because it rests on the idea of the individual. Think about it: the iPhone, the iPad. It’s all about the “I”. ’
I do think about it, and I’m not sure I follow, but Kathleen is in full flow.
‘People in power don’t want people to get together and make relationships with each other; they want to turn them into isolated, individuated atoms that consume products. An Oxfam report came out today saying eight human beings currently own half the world’s wealth. As human beings who are not members of those elites, the only thing we have is each other. If we take those steps to abolish those practices that keep us isolated and separated from each other, we might stand a chance to do something different in our world.’
‘Is the answer banning robots?’ I ask.
For the first time, Kathleen hesitates. ‘Museums are good places for robots. Certainly, we should have automation in our lives – that can be quite helpful to us, as human beings. But the problem once again comes from the concentration of power in the hands of a few.’
In fact, the CASR doesn’t have a clear position on whether they are calling for sex robots to be outlawed. At first they demanded a ban, then they called for a serious examination of the ethical consequences, and then they campaigned for ‘public consultations ahead of developing legislation’, without specifying what that legislation should be. Kathleen’s campaign is more of a critique than a movement, and it’s not a neat, easy-to-grasp critique, either: it relies on very specific, academic definitions of personhood and sex – a premise within a very particular worldview. One that’s a world away from Farrah, or Matt, or Davecat.
‘I’ve met some of the people who are making these robots. They say they are just trying to make people happy. They say their robots are therapeutic, they are about creating an illusion of companionship for people who otherwise would not have a chance to have any companionship,’ I say.
‘It’s a myth. And it’s a lie, actually,’ Kathleen replies. ‘Every human being has relationships. We are not isolated.’
‘What about having someone to come home to? Someone they can talk to when they might otherwise never have a conversation?’
‘If you have these objects in your life you are still alone. People and objects are not interchangeable.’
‘So they are being kept alone?’
‘Yes. And the objects then start to fill the places of other human beings, of hurt feelings, of suffering, of despair, of loneliness,’ she continues. ‘I would call that part of rape culture. The more that they participate in activities that are outside of this consensual framework, they then turn themselves into objects.’
Kathleen may express it in an uncompromising and sometimes impenetrable way, but she has a point. Objectification isn’t only about encouraging people to look at human bodies as if they are things, like you might gawp at the pornified breasts and impossible waists in the Abyss Creations workroom, it’s also about treating people like objects. The global trade in human bodies for sex work – human trafficking – is a booming industry that depends on viewing women and children as nothing more than cargo, to be transported and used, like drugs or arms. Any product that encourages us to see people and objects as interchangeable also feeds into the mindset that enables slavery.
‘This is not stopping,’ Kathleen says. ‘This is a train that is going quickly and it’s going at a speed that no one really understands.’
We take a walk around the exhibition, past ASIMO the dancing robot, RoboThespian the performing robot, and Zeno, the robot boy whose expressive face will mirror any look of anger, happiness or surprise it detects on yours. Signs dotted around the hall are supposed to make us think deep thoughts. Is it ethical for a robot to pretend to be human? they ask. Would you be friends with a robot?
‘Would you be friends with a robot, Kathleen?’ I ask.
‘It’s impossible to be friends with a robot because our experience of friendship comes from human relationships. These are inanimate objects.’
She sounds almost robotic.
The Campaign Against Sex Robots got a lot of press when it first launched, but mainly because journalists liked the idea of the campaign, rather than the campaign’s ideas. It was an excuse to tell the irresistible story of the dangerous, perfect man-made partner that has always so beguiled us. Journalists weren’t interested in probing into whether the feminist abolitionist approach to property relations was the right prism through which to view sex robots; they just wanted any excuse to view sex robots. It was ironic that, given the campaign is a reaction to uncritical reporting of sex dolls and sex robots, the person reporters called on to give the counterargument on behalf of the sex tech industry was Douglas Hines, the man who probably doesn’t have a robot to sell, after all. It didn’t matter, so long as the story was good.
But Kathleen doesn’t care about a good story. She tells it as she sees it, even if she sees it in a way that is going to alienate a lot of people. The first time I ever heard her speak she was giving a lecture at the British Academy in London, and the room was packed, with rows of people standing at the back.
‘I’m thinking about changing the campaign to the Campaign Against Rape Robots, because that’s actually the most appropriate name for them,’ she told the crowd. ‘The moment sex stops being simultaneous is the moment it becomes rape.’ She went further. ‘In prostitution, women are raped. It’s paid rape. In pornography, the performers are prostitutes because they are paid for sex. Pornography simulates the experience of rape for the viewer. If you watch pornography, you are imitating a rape fantasy.’
This was too much for the audience of feminist millennials who had grown up in the age of ubiquitous free porn and would never consider themselves rape enablers. Some of them were openly laughing at her new set of definitions.
‘The world of sex robots is mimicking this cruel form of rape that’s now become mainstream and normalized in our culture. That is a problem for every single one of us. All of our relationships are at stake here,’ she implored the audience. But she had lost a lot of them.
While Matt and Roberto tinker in their workshops, fundamental questions need to be asked about the implications of what they are doing. But Kathleen might not be the person to ask them.
* * *
It’s the second International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots, and the 250-seat auditorium of Goldsmiths’ Professor Stuart Hall Building is packed. Academic delegates sit in the middle of the room: geeky men and women in their twenties and thirties with avant-garde haircuts: super-short fringes, experimental sideburns. On the left of the auditorium, near the exit, perch reporters who have flown in from across the globe to file breathless copy about any new developments in the world of sex robots. Most will leave disappointed; this is a series of academic lectures about humanoid robotics, not a demonstration of the latest hardware.
Computer scientist Dr Kate Devlin is bouncing with excitement as she takes to the podium to give her keynote spee
ch; people in her field aren’t used to journalists being so interested in their work, she jokes. The second International Congress of Love and Sex with Robots was supposed to be held in Malaysia, but the Muslim country’s Inspector General of Police banned it only days before the event, on the grounds that it was promoting ‘an unnatural culture’. It has made the conference notorious. ‘This isn’t a sex festival,’ Devlin tells the journalists. ‘We’re thinking about some really big issues.’
Co-founded by David Levy and named after his book, the two-day event is in many ways an attempt by the academics who see potential benefits in human–robot relationships to address the criticisms raised by Kathleen. She hasn’t been invited to speak today, but her arguments hang heavy in the air, and many of the speakers use their time on stage to respond to her. Devlin argues that instead of campaigning against sex robots, we should use them as an opportunity to explore new kinds of companionship and sexuality. It’s something she has covered extensively: as well as being one of the few computer scientists who specializes in sex tech, she has written about her own polyamorous relationships, and how ‘consensual nonmonogamy’ has enriched her life.
If current conceptions of sex robots objectify women, Devlin says, we should work to reshape those ideas, not try to repress them. ‘It can go somewhere else. Why does a sex robot have to look like a person?’ she asks. Advances in smart fabrics and e-textiles mean we could make abstract, immersive sex robots that can envelop and embrace you, cuddly sex robots upholstered in velvet or silk, robots with ‘mixed genitalia; tentacles instead of arms,’ she says: our attraction to the humanoid form is just a habit. I try to imagine if a horny robotic teddy with tentacles could ever have mass appeal. I can’t see it happening. Millions of years of the evolution of desire mean we are turned on by the human shape. Otherwise wouldn’t we be humping branches, or bushes, or pebbles? It will take more than clever textiles to rewire us.
Sex Robots and Vegan Meat Page 7