“The ‘gateway’ versus ‘reduction’ theories remain ambiguous and they bear investigation, though such investigation is by necessity constrained by ethical boundaries… What ethics committee would sign off a study like that? What funding body would pay for it?”
And even if you settle these kinds of ethical issues, there are the everyday ones that complicate all technological innovation. Who is ultimately in charge of the software? Can it be hacked? Will large corporations hijack the programming to spy on our sexual habits? Will Big Government monitor it to see if we’re deviants?
If you feel this talk of androids is just an absurd sci-fi scenario, it’s worth noting the idea of creating a replica human for sexual pleasure has a history as long as storytelling. Devlin’s book highlights the Greek myth about a young woman called Laodamia, whose husband Protesilaus was the first to die at the siege of Troy. Distraught with grief, Laodamia commissioned a bronze statue of her dead spouse and took it to her bed.
Then there’s the 19th-century ballet Coppélia, where a young man falls for a doll made by a malign inventor. But truth is always weirder than fiction and few stories are more haunting than the tale of the artist Oskar Kokoschka’s affair with Alma Mahler (widow of the great composer). Mahler ended the intense romance after a couple of years, but Kokoschka couldn’t come to terms with the parting. In 1918, he visited the Munich doll-maker Hermine Moos and commissioned a life-size soft effigy of Mahler, stipulating every last detail of design: “And take to heart the contours of the body, e.g. the line of the neck to the back, the curve of the belly. Please permit my sense of touch to take pleasure in those places where layers of fat or muscle suddenly give way to a sinewy covering of skin… The point of all this for me is an experience which I must be able to embrace.” Kokoschka posed the mannequin around his home and on one infamous occasion took her to the opera. But the doll proved deeply unsatisfactory and eventually, following a party, he destroyed her.
It’s easy to feel complacent; to believe this kind of obsessive behaviour that could never overtake you or me. Until you consider the average person’s emotional attachment to their smart phones, tablets and laptops. It may be too strong to say we’re in love with our electronic devices, but we display troubling signs of addiction and dependency that aren’t far removed from it. It’s fair to say I freak out more when I mislay my mobile than when I lose one of my sons. I think of my computer’s hard drive as an extension of my own memory. I see friends talk to Siri as if she’s alive and I found the film Her, where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a sultry-voiced operating system, only too plausible.
On dating sites and chat rooms identity is blurred to the point you can feel passionate desire for someone who doesn’t exist except as a projection of a stranger’s fantasies. Teledildonics (app-controlled sex-toys that can be operated remotely) mean you can have a love affair where your lover never touches you because his skill won’t match up to your smart toy. Recent sex surveys have yielded the surprising result that millennials are losing their virginity later than comparable young from the 1960s to 1980s and were generally having less sex. One hypothesis was the pressure that comes from widely available porn and the pressure to perform.
I want to be relaxed about all this. I know our forebears were deeply disturbed by the spinning Jenny, the iron horse and the contraceptive pillandthat somehow humans adapt apace and survive the relentless tide of innovation. I find Kate Devlin’s enthusiasm admirable and I’d certainly test-drive her orgasmic duvet if it came to production – although nightly use might prove a bit over-stimulating. Nevertheless, something troubles me in the whole debate. We may not yet have reliable evidence to quote about the effects of intimate human interaction with machines, but most parents I know feel they observe significant changes in their children when they spend too much time on their devices.
Gaming and social media have inbuilt features devised to create an addictive response (such as Facebook’s infamous “like” button) and bond users ever closer to their favourite ways of wasting time. With advances in virtual reality you can only envisage the dependency becoming more pronounced – and the grumpiness, anxiety and anger when asked to return to real life becoming more accentuated. And if this is true of non-sex-tech how will it not be truer of the tech designed to push our sexual buttons? Especially for those who are most vulnerable: socially inept and reclusive young men. It’s not hard to envisage a scenario in which thousands of people retreat to an online erotic life with less chance of encountering a messy, complex, self-contradictory, enticing, evolving human being.
I’ve spent 23 years researching and writing about sex and relationships and have become increasingly astonished by human capacity for erotic intimacy – and also by how frightened we can be by the levels of trust and vulnerability involved in such closeness. Some of the hardest sexual practices are paradoxically the simplest, because they involve sustained eye contact, tender exploration and gentle, slow touch. They necessitate trust of an order that doesn’t entail you thinking: “Hmm, has someone hacked into your central controls.”
I’ll probably sound wildly kooky if I talk about “energetic connection” but when you’re profoundly, erotically in tune with another personthere is a flow between bodies that seems to transcend the purely physical. The irony is that we call it “electrifying” in homage to the spark that gives life to machines. Science can surely explain that amoroussensation via dopamine, oxytocin and a crucible of other feel-good chemicals, but it’s still a peculiarly human, interactive sensation.
More than that, let us consider the slippery, contradictory nature of desire. Do we ever want what we think we want? Aren’t our deepest yearnings to some extent occluded? Societal norms, parental guidance and peer pressure steer us for so long that it can take decades to know your own sexual taste. And then there’s the fact that when you get what you want it often leaves you unsatisfied. A friend filled in an online dating form saying she wanted a tall, dark, handsome London-based professional and promptly fell in love with a short, sandy, eccentric farmer from Wales.
Can we write algorithms for androids that delight and frustrate us in equal measure, that keep pace with our unconscious desires, that change our perceptions of our needs and deepest longings? Can a robot ever resonate with that iridescent glow of heart and soul that comes from melding with your best beloved to the point you don’t know where your own body starts and his ends? Could you feel the fine hairs on your neck rise as your android lover turned to look at you across a crowded room, although your back was turned to theirs? I know many thousands would sign up for a Rampant Rabbit that had a robotic Idris Elba attached to it. And far more for a compliant sex-bot that looked and talked like Scarlett Johansson. But I’ll always yearn for that small epiphany Nora Ephron outlined in Sleepless in Seattle:
“Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up… I knew it the very first time I touched her. … I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car, and I knew. It was like… magic.”
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