Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships - Hardcover

Levy, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061359750 ISBN 13: 9780061359750

Publisher: Harper, 2007

Synopsis

Love, marriage, and sex with robots? Not in a million years? Maybe a whole lot sooner.From a leading expert in artificial intelligence comes an eye-opening, superbly argued book that explores a new level of human intimacy and relationships—with robots.

From Pygmalion falling for his chiseled Galatea to Dr. Frankenstein marveling at his "modern Prometheus" to the man-meets-machine fiction of Philip K. Dick and Michael Crichton, humans have been enthralled by the possibilities of emotional relationships with their technological creations. Synthesizing cutting-edge research in robotics with the cultural history and psychology of artificial intelligence, Love and Sex with Robots explores this fascination and its far-reaching implications.

Using examples drawn from around the world, David Levy shows how automata have evolved from the mechanical marvels of centuries past to the electronic androids of the modern age, and how human interactions with technology have changed over the years. Along the way, Levy explores many aspects of human relationships—the reasons we fall in love, why we form emotional attachments to animals and to virtual pets such as the Tamagotchi, and why these same attachments could extend to love for robots. He also examines the needs we seek to fulfill through sexual relationships, tracking the development of life-sized dolls, machines, and other sexual devices, and demonstrating how society's ideas about what constitutes normal sex have changed—and will continue to change—as sexual technology becomes increasingly sophisticated.

Shocking but utterly convincing, Love and Sex with Robots provides insights that are surprisingly relevant to our everyday interactions with technology. This is science brought to life, and Levy makes a compelling and titillating case that the entities we once deemed cold and mechanical will soon become the objects of real companionship and human desire. Anyone reading the book with an open mind will find a wealth of fascinating material on this important new direction of intimate relationships, a direction that, before long, will be regarded as perfectly normal.

About this title

About the Author

David Levy is an internationally recognized expert on artificial intelligence and the president of the International Computer Games Association. He is also the author of the industry primer Robots Unlimited. He lives in London.

From the Back Cover

Love, marriage, and sex with robots? Not in a million years? Maybe a whole lot sooner.From a leading expert in artificial intelligence comes an eye-opening, superbly argued book that explores a new level of human intimacy and relationships—with robots.

From Pygmalion falling for his chiseled Galatea to Dr. Frankenstein marveling at his "modern Prometheus" to the man-meets-machine fiction of Philip K. Dick and Michael Crichton, humans have been enthralled by the possibilities of emotional relationships with their technological creations. Synthesizing cutting-edge research in robotics with the cultural history and psychology of artificial intelligence, Love and Sex with Robots explores this fascination and its far-reaching implications.

Using examples drawn from around the world, David Levy shows how automata have evolved from the mechanical marvels of centuries past to the electronic androids of the modern age, and how human interactions with technology have changed over the years. Along the way, Levy explores many aspects of human relationships—the reasons we fall in love, why we form emotional attachments to animals and to virtual pets such as the Tamagotchi, and why these same attachments could extend to love for robots. He also examines the needs we seek to fulfill through sexual relationships, tracking the development of life-sized dolls, machines, and other sexual devices, and demonstrating how society's ideas about what constitutes normal sex have changed—and will continue to change—as sexual technology becomes increasingly sophisticated.

Shocking but utterly convincing, Love and Sex with Robots provides insights that are surprisingly relevant to our everyday interactions with technology. This is science brought to life, and Levy makes a compelling and titillating case that the entities we once deemed cold and mechanical will soon become the objects of real companionship and human desire. Anyone reading the book with an open mind will find a wealth of fascinating material on this important new direction of intimate relationships, a direction that, before long, will be regarded as perfectly normal.

Reviews

Reviewed by Joel Achenbach

Here’s a prediction that’ll make you squirm: In the future, people will fall in love with robots. Robots will not be cold, predictable machines, but actual lovers — precocious, sexy, and remarkably humanlike in appearance. Humans will even marry robots in certain obliging jurisdictions. Now send the kids into the other room while we mention the obvious, bizarre implication: Someday, people will have sex with robots.

And not just cold, mechanical sex that barely incites a feeble meep-meep-meep from your robot lover: No, we’re talking about real elbow-pads-and-helmets sex. Electrifying sex! (And afterward the robot will take a drag on a cigarette and say, "That really recharged my batteries.")

We learn all this from robot enthusiast David Levy in his intriguing but very strange new book, Love and Sex with Robots, which if nothing else gets points for the straightforward title. Levy, whose previous book, Robots Unlimited, outlined the coming era of ubiquitous robotics, has taken his scenario to its logical, if not entirely persuasive, conclusion:

"Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans," Levy writes, "while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach us more than is in all of the world's published sex manuals combined."

Levy goes on to imagine a world of robot prostitutes, or "sexbots," which would offer people a chance to practice their technique before entering a human relationship. "With a robot prostitute," he writes, "the control of disease is implicit -- simply remove the active parts and put them in the disinfecting machine."

At this point you are likely holding up both hands with palms outward in the internationally recognized gesture meaning "Stop." This sounds crazy. Clearly robots are not going to become plausible objects of sexual relationships, much less actual romance and genuine love, until they have a serious makeover. Human love isn't so shallow that we'll fall for the first machine with a nice pair of antennae.

But Levy's thesis isn't as silly as you might initially think. We are living in a period of revolutionary advances in computer software and processing speeds. The Japanese already have a multi-billion-dollar robot industry, including robots used to keep an eye on -- and even bathe -- the elderly. Sony has invented a robotic dog named AIBO. Honda has created an android that can climb stairs. Carnegie-Mellon University invented a robot, Grace, that managed to register by itself (herself?) for an academic conference. Meanwhile, researchers are experimenting with flexible polymers that can be used as artificial skin, an essential leap for the creation of robots you might actually want to cuddle. Most important, robots will have to learn to act like humans; one researcher, Levy reports, has designed robots that can exhibit 77 human behavior patterns.

The key is that these technological advances will someday be complemented by cultural changes, and cavorting with robots just won't seem weird anymore. "It would not surprise me if a significant proportion of readers deride these ideas until my predictions have been proved correct," Levy writes, and then makes a cheap analogy to people who once were hostile to the idea that the Earth was round rather than flat.

Levy's book is entertaining in parts, such as the eye-opening (even climactic) section on the evolution of vibrators. "A steam-driven vibrator invented in the United States in 1869 was inconvenient for doctors to use because they repeatedly had to shovel coal into its boiler," he writes. (Who among us has not heard the command, "Keep shoveling"?)

But throughout Love and Sex with Robots, there's a recurring sense of the writer trying a little too hard: Every brick must be carefully laid as he builds the great edifice of his thesis. Thus, we must labor through long sections on why people fall in love, why they love their pets, how they become attached to their computers, and so on, before we can get to the good stuff on sex toys. And it's not clear that Levy -- described on the book jacket as "an internationally recognized expert in artificial intelligence" -- is truly an expert on the subject of human love. He seems more like a partisan in a technological debate most of us didn't realize was going on.

No doubt it is a good bet that technology and sexual desire will continue to have a mutually supporting relationship. But Levy is not merely saying that sex toys will be more elaborate in the future. He is envisioning robots as essentially interchangeable with people. The problem is, a robot programmed to fall in love with a person is essentially a fancy inflatable doll. Imagine the awkward moments:

Robot: I love the clever way you comb those few, thin, feeble locks of hair all the way over the vast bald region of your head.

Human: You're just saying that.

Levy stipulates, near the end of the book, that an important part of sexuality is "the possibility of failure or denial," and thus sexbots will need to be able to mimic human "capriciousness." But at some point you wind up with sexbots out of control, which, come to think of it, is a great idea for a science fiction movie.

If Levy is right, the era of rambunctious robot love is not far in the future. But I'd advise everyone to hang on to a flesh-and-blood backup.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

In this wide-ranging examination of the emotional and physical relations between humans and the inanimate objects of their desire, AI guru Levy (Robots Unlimited) first addresses the question of love with robots, and moves on to consider the mechanics of actually having sex with them. In order to put the reader at ease with the possibility of human-robot love, Levy compares the phenomenon to the ways in which humans fall in love with each other, their pets, and even their motorcycles. From there, Levy argues, it is a short emotional step to the affection people can be expected to display towards robots. Some readers may be turned off by Levy's fairly graphic descriptions of the mechanics of having sex with robots, and may wonder why Levy chose not to include recent research on the human genome that could one day lead to replacing human "parts," potentially making us more robot-like ourselves. Though Levy's topic is undeniably on the fringe, it will appeal to readers keen on pondering futuristic scenarios.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Love and Sex with Robots

The Evolution of Human-Robot RelationshipsBy David Levy

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2007 David Levy
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061359750

Chapter One

Falling in Love (with People)

Why on earth should people fall in love with robots? A very good question, and one that is central to this book. But before we can begin to answer this question, we need to examine exactly why we humans fall in love, why love develops in one person for another human being.

Since the 1980s many aspects of love have become hot research topics in psychology, but one area that has been relatively neglected by researchers is why people fall in love. Even more surprising, perhaps, is the conclusion of some recent studies that romantic love is a continuation of the process of attachment, a well-known and well-studied phenomenon in children but less studied in adults. Attachment is a feeling of affection, usually for a person but sometimes for an object or even for an institution such as a school or corporation.

Children first become attached to objects very early in their lives. Babies only a few weeks old exhibit some of the signs of attachment, initially to their mothers, and as babies grow older, the signs of attachment extend to certain objects and remain evident for several years. A baby cries for its blanket and its rattle, a toddler for its teddy bear; a primary-school child yearns for her doll. Different items become the focus of each child's possessive attentiveness as the process continues, but with changing objects of attachment. Toys, Walkmen, computer consoles, bicycles, and almost any other possession can become the focus of the attachment process. As the child develops into a young adult who in turn develops into a more mature adult, so the process continues to hold sway, but with the object of focus generally changing to "adult toys" such as cars and computers. And, as the psychologists now tell us, attachment to people becomes evident in a different guise, as adults fall in love.

Attachment and Love

Attachment is a term in psychology most commonly used to describe the emotionally close and important relationships that people have with each other. Attachment theory was founded on the need to explain the emotional bond between mother and infant.* The British developmental psychologist John Bowlby, one of the first investigators in this field, described attachment as a behavioral system operated by infants to regulate their proximity to their primary caregivers. He explained the evolution of such a system as being essential for the survival of the infant, in view of its inability to feed itself, its very limited capacities for exploring the world around it, and its powerlessness to avoid and defend itself from danger. Bowlby also believed that the significance of attachment is not restricted to children but that it extends "from the cradle to the grave," playing an important role in the emotional lives of adults.

Bowlby's notion of attachment as a phenomenon that spans the entire human life span was first explored at a symposium organized by the American Psychological Association in 1976, and during the 1970s and early 1980s Bowlby's ideas on attachment were embraced by several psychologists investigating the nature and causes of love and loneliness in adults. Some of these researchers had observed that the frequency and nature of periods of loneliness appear to be influenced by a person's history of attachment, but until the late 1980s there was no solid theory that linked a person's attachment history with his or her love life. Then, in 1987, Cindy Hazan and Philip Shaver suggested that romantic love is an attachment process akin to that between mother and child, a concept that they then applied successfully to the study of adult romantic relationships, with the spouse and various significant others replacing parents as the attachment figures. The principal propositions of their theory have been summarized as follows:

1. The emotional and behavioral dynamics of infant-caregiver relationships and adult romantic relationships are governed by the same biological system.

2. The kinds of individual differences observed in infant-caregiver relationships are similar to the differences observed in romantic relationships.

3. Individual differences in adult attachment behavior are reflections of the expectations and beliefs people have formed about themselves and their close relationships, on the basis of their attachment histories. These "working models" are relatively stable and, as such, may be reflections of early experiences with a caregiver.

4. Romantic love, as commonly conceived, involves the interplay of three major biological behavior systems: attachment (lovers feel a dependence on each other in a way that is similar to how a baby feels about her mother); caregiving (one lover sees the other as a child that needs to be cared for in some way); and sex (for which there is no simple parallel in attachment theory).

In practice, the similarity between infant-caregiver attachment and adult romantic attachment manifests itself principally in four different ways: Both infants and adults enjoy being in the presence of their attachment figures and seek them out to engender praise when they accomplish something or when they feel threatened; both infants and adults become distressed when separated from their attachment figures; both infants and adults regard their attachment figures as providing security for them when they feel distressed; and both infants and adults feel more comfortable when exploring new possibilities if they are doing so in the presence of, or when accessible to, their attachment figures.

Hazan and Shaver's theory of romantic love as an attachment process contributed little to psychologists' understanding of the role played by attachment in romantic relationships, or to how that form of attachment evolves. Shaver's view at the time was that the process of natural selection had somehow "co-opted" the human attachment system in order to facilitate the bonding process in couples, thereby promoting feelings akin to the parental instincts that help infants to survive. But during the 1990s, researchers into the theory instead began to come to the conclusion that there exists a "modest to moderate degree of continuity in attachment style"1 as a person ages, implying that those infants who have strong attachment bonds with their mothers are more likely to grow into adults who have strong attachment bonds with their partners. If this is indeed the case, then one's capacity to experience romantic love would appear to depend on one's attachment history.

Continues...

Excerpted from Love and Sex with Robotsby David Levy Copyright © 2007 by David Levy. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061359750
• ISBN 13: 9780061359750
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352