Sex Robots and Vegan Meat

by Jenny Kleeman

  Then she talks about Paro, a fluffy, white, AI-enhanced robotic seal pup from Japan, who squeals and blinks its long eyelashes, and is charged by inserting a plug designed to look like a baby’s dummy into its mouth. Paro has been used as a therapeutic pet for people with dementia across the world, from the US to Germany to NHS care homes in the UK. ‘Paro doesn’t need feeding, doesn’t shit all over the carpet, no one wants to have sex with Paro,’ Devlin jokes. Companion robots like Paro have brought great comfort to people who would otherwise have little contact, and sex robots could take that fulfilment a step further, she argues. There is something so terribly sad about people in nursing homes having robotic pets when what they really need is human contact, but the assumption seems to be that robots are more dependable than humans. ‘To ban or stop this development would be short-sighted, as the therapeutic potential is very good,’ she says. ‘It’s not necessarily going to be a terrible thing.’

  Devlin says other issues posed by sex robots are far more pressing: they could easily betray you by divulging your data. And smart sex toys have already done this: in March 2017, the Canadian makers of the We-Vibe vibrator paid out a $3.75 million settlement in a class action lawsuit after it was revealed its makers were collecting real time data on how often its 300,000 owners used the vibrator, and at what intensity. Later that year, Hong Kong-based smart sextoy maker Lovense’s remote control vibrator app was found to be recording the sound of some users’ masturbation sessions without their knowledge and secretly storing the audio files. Once a robot like Harmony is on the market, she will know a lot more about her owner than a simple vibrator ever could. What if this information fell into the wrong hands?

  Problems with smart sex toys have also revealed the potential for sexual assault at the hands of robots. The American Siime Eye vibrator, which has a built in camera so users can ‘record and share’ their sessions, has been found to be easily hackable, meaning that the incredibly intimate videos it takes could be stolen, but also that control of the device could be hijacked by strangers. Devlin doesn’t mention it, but Lovense’s Hush butt plug was discovered to have security problems that meant it could be remotely controlled by anyone within Bluetooth range. Hacked sex robots have the potential to cause scenarios even more nightmarish than butt plugs gone rogue.

  My mind reels when I think about how lucrative it could be to sell the data sex robots collect from their owners to advertisers. Matt’s words flood back into my head: She systematically tries to find out more about you, until she knows all the things that make you you, until all those empty spots are filled. Forget Cambridge Analytica and Facebook – there is a future where the information your partner has learned from you could be sold to the highest bidder. And then the being you love and trust the most might be used as the most powerful marketing tool ever known, making suggestions and recommendations to try to convince you to buy stuff. Or vote for stuff. Sex robots could entertain you, satisfy you, but also humiliate, hurt and exploit you. Perhaps there is no such thing as the perfect, true companion after all, human or humanoid.

  Levy takes to the stage to thank Devlin. ‘I’m glad that someone has the courage to speak out against Kathleen Richardson,’ he says. ‘Would you be against the idea that a sex robot would keep data about the experiences that it has had with its human lover in an attempt to become a better lover and for its human partner to become a better lover? Sex robots could use learning to great advantage.’ As ever, Levy is determined to see the positives.

  Sex robots appear to be the perfect blank canvas onto which to project your own personal beliefs and hang-ups, even if you would never consider having sex with one of them. If you are a male libertarian computer scientist, they are a brave new world of opportunity. If you are polyamorous sex tech specialist, they offer a way of exploring unconventional kinds of sexuality beyond what Devlin calls the ‘monoheteronormative’ mainstream. If you are a Marxist feminist, they represent the commodification of women. The debate currently taking place about sex robots reveals more about us today, our current desires and fears, than it does about the future of sex.

  At the close of the day, Levy makes a casual remark that lingers with me. No matter what Kathleen might be campaigning for, he says, there is nothing anyone can do to stop the rise of the sex robots. ‘I don’t think anything to do with ethics or morals is going to stand in the way,’ he continues. ‘I really don’t think it’s possible to stop the world from developing something the world wants to develop. There are too many countries, too many rogue states, too many commercial interests.’

  And of course, he’s right. While academics tie themselves in ethical knots in the UK, the Chinese have been quietly getting on with the job.

  * * *

  Two of the most enduring clichés about East Asia are that, first, it’s where technology advances unconstrained by any ethical boundaries and, second, it’s the home of the world’s weirdest attitudes to sex. People in China, Korea and Japan are supposed to be both sex obsessed and sexless, an incoherent and unfair stereotype, especially given that much of the demand for the strangest sex toys made in this part of the world comes from North America and Europe.

  But it’s true to say that East Asia is where most of the world’s sex dolls are manufactured, and it’s also where the most startlingly realistic humanoid robots are developed. Take Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics’ Sophia, the robot with fifty different facial expressions and the first humanoid to be made a full citizen of a nation (the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a country that doesn’t grant citizenship to human refugees and is probably not the best place for any female, synthetic or organic). Or Geminoid, the famously uncanny robot the Japanese engineer Hiroshi Ishiguro created in 2007 to be his identical twin. As Ishiguro gets older, he keeps the same hairstyle and has regular corrective plastic surgery so he continues to look exactly like his android doppelgänger, an effort that is both vain and in vain.

  Matt may have tried to give me the impression that I’d be wasting my time if I looked into the sex robots from East Asia, but he knows very well that this is where the greatest advances in humanoid technology are being made. And his biggest competitor is here, watching his every move from a port in a peninsula that juts out into the Yellow Sea.

  If Abyss Creations is the Apple of sex dolls, Doll Sweet is Samsung. Based in Dalian, one of China’s busiest seaports, DS has been making and shipping their DS Doll line of sex dolls since 2010. They sell around 3,000 a year, mainly to Japan, Europe and the US (Miss Winter, the one doll in Davecat’s collection that he doesn’t ‘get romantic’ with, is a DS Doll). Like RealDolls, DS Dolls are ultra-realistic, handmade in a custom blend of silicone, fully poseable and customizable, with faces cast from clay sculptures, and feet and hands cast from life. But they are cheaper and faster than RealDolls: you can buy a full doll for $3,000, and it will only take them a week or so to make it.

  And DS Dolls are beautiful. They have delicate, perfect features and none of the brassiness or pornified proportions of their American competitors. Some of the dolls have very young-looking faces (although always on adult bodies), but Fleur and Serena are clearly supposed to be mature models, with crow’s feet and dark circles under their eyes. (There are no sagging breasts or middle-age spread in their selection of bodies yet, though.) Most of the face options are Asian, but there are European ones too. ‘We create beauties and dreams,’ says their English language website. ‘Our mission is to promote openness, innovation, towards progressive and more perfect development.’ In this spirit of openness, the site has an unintentionally hilarious video of a man in a lab coat and white gloves, whose face is never shown, clinically palpating a doll’s breasts to demonstrate their lifelike bounciness, while an instrumental piano version of Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ tinkles in the background.

  DS Robotics was launched in 2016, several years after Matt started work on Harmony, but DS spent far more, far quicker than Abyss: $2 million in the first two years of research and development. The vid
eos they have released of their prototype make Harmony look prehistoric. Their robot has a fully expressive face: she can wink, raise her eyebrows, grimace and guffaw, and her smile is warm and believable, with no hint of Harmony’s eyeless sarcastic smirk. Her arms and upper body move, and she tilts her head lyrically when she talks – or sings, as she does in Chinese in one of the videos, closing her eyes and swaying, as if lost in the music. DS have focused on getting the animatronics right, and the AI is an afterthought so far, little more than you would find in Siri or Alexa, meaning their prototype looks and feels incredibly real, but doesn’t sound it. Yet.

  It took four months of emailing, but I finally have a video call scheduled with Steven Zhang in Dalian. He’s the chief development officer of DS Robotics and he appears in some of the videos goofing around with the prototype. In one, she screams and startles him, making him spill water all over his white lab coat; in another, he squirts breath freshener into his mouth and gives her a peck on the cheek that makes her roll her eyes and dry heave. His background is in movie effects, special make up and 3D animation, so he is used to making his creations perform.

  When I finally see Steven, he is serious, professional, with the presence, confidence and authority of a man who leads a team with a multimillion-dollar budget. The white coat is off; he wears a blue shirt buttoned up to the neck and glasses with thin, tortoiseshell frames. The lab around him is bright and busy – there are thirty people in the robotics department, and many of them are working together at a huge pine table, next to a wall filled with racks of electronics.

  ‘There will be a very huge market for the robot, and we want to get into that market,’ he says, in almost perfect but thickly accented English. ‘Very huge, I think, not only in China. In future, many people will need robots to do a lot of work that can help people.’

  ‘You mean service robots?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, like in the government, in the office, in restaurants and movie theatres. Anywhere you would see people – like waiters, serving people – you will find robots.’

  ‘Then why focus on robots you can have sex with?’

  ‘The sex robot is just a small part of the function,’ he says, with a gentle smile; it reminds me of Matt’s exasperation that I kept focusing on the sex when he had made a robot that could do so much more. ‘Maybe some people want the beautiful, the hot-woman type robot with the sex function, but that’s not the main point.’

  The main challenge DS Robotics is grappling with is the uncanny valley, which makes sex robots unsexy, Steven says. ‘We have been in the adult product market for many years. We know when people want silicone dolls they have some beautiful image in their head. When the sex doll is sitting in the chair or lying on the bed, they can still have that image. But when the sex doll starts to do some actions, that totally breaks the image.’ At the moment, sex robots aren’t convincing enough for owners to suspend their disbelief, but they have the potential to shatter the imaginary world doll owners create around their dolls. ‘At this stage, the technology can’t replace real humans.’

  ‘One day the technology will be good enough, though, won’t it?’

  ‘Yes. We hope that day comes soon,’ he replies, with another soft smile.

  He takes me on a Skype tour of the lab. Men with bowl haircuts are hunched over LCD screens. The two prototypes I recognize from the videos are at the far end, near the window. There is a delicate, elegant robot with long, tousled hair, dressed in a pastel blue cheongsam adorned with embroidered flowers, who bows demurely and says, ‘Nıˇ haˇo.’

  ‘We hope this one could go in the front door of some store,’ Steven says.

  The other robot has exposed circuitry at the back of her head. There’s skin only on her face, neck and shoulders; the rest of her is a dark, intricate skeleton with a full set of ribs. Steven picks up a robotic arm covered with pale flesh and brings it back over to his desk to show me how it moves. It’s bewildering how graceful steel and silicone have become in this laboratory.

  ‘How close are we to a full body robot?’ I ask.

  ‘Right now, the arms and the top half of the body move, and the face. I think maybe next year.’

  ‘Will it be able to walk next year?’

  He nods emphatically. ‘We try to do that.’ He does a little walking action with his fingers, making them scuttle across his desk. ‘We hope that people won’t be able to separate real humans from robots in future, so that relations between humans and robots will be better.’

  ‘In what way will it make it better?’

  ‘In many ways. Let me think how to say this in English. Right now we can buy robots from eBay or anywhere else that can help people clean their rooms. There are also robots that can cook. We can already buy them very cheaply. But they don’t look human. When people have choice, they would like a beautiful girl or handsome man to help them clean their room and cook, not some movable trash can.’

  ‘So your idea is that in the future we will have service robots that can do everything for us? They can cook, they can clean, and if we want to have a relationship with them, we can?’

  ‘Yes,’ Steven nods with enthusiasm. ‘That’s right. In future.’

  ‘You are using what you’ve learned at DS about how to make very realistic dolls that look and feel human, and you’re adding that technology so people can have a service robot at home that they treat as a person, and if they want to have sex with it they can?’

  ‘Yes, that’s correct.’

  I have to ask him twice to be sure, because suddenly it all makes sense to me: the people who make sex robots are making slaves. Not human slaves, of course, but slaves who will one day be almost indistinguishable from humans. If they succeed, it will become normal for us to share our homes with beings we never have to empathize with, who exist only to fulfil our every wish, and who do everything human that most humans would rather not do.

  Just as Matt, Roberto, Sergi and Steven have been trying to tell me all along, this really isn’t about sex at all.

  * * *

  The sex robots of our collective imaginations – perfect synthetic companions without human flaws – don’t exist. But they will do, and sooner than most of us realize. Within a decade or two, the technology will be advanced enough, and affordable enough, to make relationships with robots normal rather than niche.

  The people who make these robots, and the academics and columnists debating them, are from a generation who will probably never have a relationship with one. Steven says most of the people who have paid the £300 deposit for DS’s robotic head in Europe and North America are ‘young men’. Paul Lumb, the British boss of Cloud Climax, the retailer with the licence to distribute DS Dolls in Europe, says the customers showing an interest in the dolls and robots are part of a new sexual revolution where almost anything goes. ‘We’ve changed so much over the past ten years. We’re so open regarding sexuality and sexual preferences,’ he tells me.

  Paul has warehouses in the Netherlands and the north west of England, and works with manufacturers all over Asia. He is constantly travelling. When I manage to reach him on the phone on a Sunday afternoon, he apologizes for being hard to find. ‘It’s an exciting time for us at the moment. It’s business on steroids.’ He talks like a contestant on The Apprentice, full of buzzwords and car metaphors. And he likes to talk; I don’t have to ask him much at all.

  ‘Personal self-gratification comes in many formats,’ he says. ‘To me, the dolls are the Bugatti Veyron of adult toys. They are a big investment – not just the financial investment but also the emotional investment. Not everybody’s got the space and storage for a 168-centimetre, 38-kg doll.’

  But when he talks about how much the videos of DS’s robotic heads have caused a sensation on Instagram, he says something I’m not expecting.

  ‘We are not lovers of social media, believe you me,’ he confides. ‘It’s probably altering people’s psychology. We don’t know if it has damaging effects on interaction and procreatio
n – if you can’t get in a relationship because you can only speak with your phone, how the hell are you going to start a family? It’s that serious, really.’

  ‘Do you not think that maybe the robots have the potential for that, though?’ I ask. ‘That you can get so used to being with a robot that you won’t want to go out and meet a human flesh and blood person?’

  For the first time, he pauses. ‘You know, that’s a deep question. It’s a tough question.’ It turns out it’s one he doesn’t want to answer. ‘I know from a lot of our owners that the majority of them are in relationships. I wouldn’t say we had anyone who was lonely and feels detached from society.’ Not yet, at least.

  ‘I’m quite old school, Jenny,’ he continues. ‘I’m forty-six years young. I think back to the days where there was no such thing as a mobile phone. I was moving around the country going to raves, and we were reliant upon the interaction with others through word of mouth and flyers to see the next DJ and the next venue. We experienced the summer of love, things that you can grasp and harness, things that build your character. We’d go into a bar or a club and we’d put the world to rest and we were very confident in the way we were going. That’s been taken away from a lot of people now. Because of the world of technology, social interaction is more limited.’

  But while I hear such loss in the changes Paul is describing, he sees commercial opportunity. ‘Younger people work harder now, and longer hours, so downtime is at a premium. We’re finding that there’s an interaction with more technology-based products for distance relationships. You can have a relationship with someone you’ve built up through social networking and use all the products that are available for intimate distance relationships. That’s something we really wanted to harness. We wanted to be at the forefront of technology. It’s the next generation of lifestyle and well-being.’