“Would you want to have sex with a robot?”
“Gosh no!”
The 30 year-old bank teller moves back in her seat, staring at me as if I’m the devil incarnate. Not even with Judd Law’s sexy Gigolo Joe in Spielberg’s tear-jerking “AI”? She deflects cleverly. “That poor child!”
It was 2017 when I conducted robot sex interviews for the online publication, La Femme Futura, which since then folded as its futuristic lifestyle stories were too far ahead of its time. Time rushes and our naive discussions around AI have developed fast and robots entered mainstream.
2017 seems part of a long gone decade.
Pre-Covid, 300 guest wedding receptions were part of our normal. I took the opportunity to interview people after their first signature cocktails, hoping that they’ll be more often for weird questions when slightly buzzed.
What about robots, gentlemen?
Men are used to the idea of sex dolls: dames des voyages traveled with sailors since the 17th century. Rubber dolls for fornicatory purposes entered the market in early 1900 and who hasn’t heard at least one joke about inflatable vinyl vixens who burst at their seams when jumped.
A dozen men between 30 and 60 agreed that sex was out of the question if the object of desire looked like a machine. Several finished the thought with a grin, “But if she’s got big boobs…tight butts… luscious lips…. ” Male Millennials, wrongly accused as the hook-up generation, weren’t excited by the proposal at all, human looking or not. They claimed that they are looking for intimacy, not one night stands.
After being showered with jovial jokes, a middle age photographer sums it up for me: “Most men have sex with anything beautiful. You should know that by now.”
Yes, okay. But we are in 2017…? I switched back to women.
How does your perfect man look like?
While their guests were munching steaks, medium rare, the waitresses went right into the fascinating possibilities; considering how their handsome bot would, or should, feel. During cake time a few middle-aged ladies, asked about their desire to order a customized man of their own, looked over their shoulders and answered in whisper mode: “No more fear that he’d leave me for somebody younger? Yes!”
My workout trainer and her colleague didn’t hesitate a second to go out with Mr. Robot with the sole intention of entertaining sex. A handsome workout machine providing exactly what they want without having to hope that a human would understand their sexual desires? Artfully coded orgasm assistance was their dream come true. I could have sold two bots right there.
With my girl friends the discussions went immediately to just that: humanizing the macho machine and loading him with “true” lover qualities. Most of us have scribbled the dream dude into our journals at one time in our life, a meticulously carved image of our emotional twin far away from the ridiculously reduced attributes used by dating websites.
We’ve learned to compromise, to overlook unpleasant male modes or demands. We would love to be listened to, even when we “talk too much” and hugged when we change our minds five times. A bot would hold our hands when we flip out and don’t ask if it’s “that time again.” I’d add codes for fashion sense, love of language, mysteries, art, architecture and far out imagination.
Will the perfect robot lover of our dreams be programmed to always agree? Are we that tired of standing up for our true desires and getting what we really want that we long for a Yes-man?
We allowed for bitch meters to protect the bot and agreed on his ability of productive criticism. By interaction we could over time feed the AI with everything we know and love, all our thoughts and desires plus every other quality we fancy. He wouldn't come on a white horse but with a bouquet of our own best features. He would be so much better than ourselves. We would not feel insignificant but grow with him and always know that even if we don’t he’d love us “just the way we are.”
Can programmed love ever be meaningful? Kissed by a robot we can’t be sentimental; “love” has nothing to do with it. It would be like an arranged marriage in which only one person is truly happy and satisfied, a one-sided “I do.”
“You mean, we’ll create slaves,” comments a 26-year-old PHD student, whose focus is machine learning.
Discussion about the ethical treatments of AI started years ago in Korea. The “Robot Ethics Charter” for manufacturers and users stems from 2007. Its key considerations are preventing illegal use, protecting data acquired by robots and establishing clear identification and traceability of machines.
If we want anything close to love from machines they have to have free will. If they have free will we're back at square one. No guarantees for a happy ever after whatsoever.
Would a free will robot want to have sex with you?
The biggest problems is that we are delusional. Naive like little kids. Why would a self learning AI ever love us? Its asking that a man falls in love with a female ant. When AI learns by itself we will be idiots in a world of grand AI minds. The question isn’t anymore if we would want to have sex with a robot but if the super machine would want to have sex with us.
Ray Kurzweil, still at Google promoted the concept of exponential development in his book, “The Singularity is near,” in 2005. His predictions for the time when the abilities of a computer overtake the abilities of the human brain, will occur in about 2045. Several scientists believe this event may be much more imminent, especially with the advent of quantum computing.
It’s 2021. The Paul Allen institute for AI says it’ll be quite a while before self conscious AI will walk the planet. The employees of OpenAI, Elon’s research company, vote every year on how long they think it’ll take. They are at 15 years at this time.
Since I conducted my interviews, robots have entered main stream media, in part thanks to Elon Musk’s warnings. His company Neurolink. Its chip in our head aims at interfacing with AI and evokes the hope that we could be equals to self learning master pieces of human creation that would out mode our meager capacities rapidly.
Can we control AI at all?
Narrow intelligence, the kind of clumsy AI that surrounds us today, has already served as an example of our mistakes. We now know that algorithms are biased and fragile, they can perpetrate abuse and deception. Worse, the expense of developing and running them puts them into in the hands of a few with who knows what kind of agendas and what might go wrong on the fight for profits.
Elon’s OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. Its sacred charter declares that OpenAI’s primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. But OpenAI is one of many.
Are we doomed?
Would you want to became a Cyborg?
Only one thing seems clear: Robots and Androids are coming to our town. There better be safety bubbles.
We’ve got two decades to love the heck out of what we have now. Make it count, people before we throw kisses at robots and they give us their metallic shoulder.
Journal about it. Feel it out. Prepare yourself for the future.