“I don’t play golf,” Toler says. He thumps the bobblehead, sending Tiger into a frenzy, his smiling face warning no, no, no! “But I’ve been so envious of Henry ever since he started his little project. The life of the mind. That’s the thing.” He puts his hand on Tiger, stops the shaking. “So Henry told me that you’ve come up with a groundbreaking theory. I think he said”—he clears his throat, as if about to say something untoward—“of love.”
“Well,” I say, listening for condescension but not quite hearing it. “Love is the word he uses.”
“I assumed you meant love as in the ‘affective reasoner’—the positive pole of attraction—but he says this is much more fundamental.”
With my lack of technical background, this sentence might as well be in Urdu. “I’m glad to hear he likes the idea so much.”
“How are you planning on doing it? Just a rearrangement of GSPs? Or will you be doing some more work in the construal frames?”
Urdu again. The answer, of course, is I don’t know. I don’t know what GSPs are. Or construal frames. I suppose I could just confess, but I feel embarrassed for Livorno, as if I should hide his bad decision to hire me.
“Something like that.”
Toler frowns. “What was your specialization for your doctorate?”
“I have a master’s in business administration.”
He slaps his hand on the desk. “I was wondering why you were so goddamned dense. I just assumed once he shanghaied that Indonesian whiz kid you’ve got over there . . .” There’s a knock on the door. Grace comes in with our Earl Grey. She’s still unsmiling, but now that she’s not hidden behind the reception desk I see that she’s wearing a pornographically short skirt. It seems very wrong for this early in the morning. Toler passes his eyes over her legs and then lets a yellowish lip fall in a lopsided smile. When she leaves the room I expect some boy’s-club remark, but he says nothing. I feel a clammy sweat above my eyebrows.
“I didn’t know Laham’s reputation preceded him,” I say. I hold on to the hot tea. Am I trying to impress this knucklehead? What am I asking—of course I’m trying to impress this knucklehead.
“Laham—right. What is that unpronounceable last name of his again?”
Simunjuntak, but I shrug apologetically, as if I don’t remember.
“Honestly, Neill, I prefer talking to a businessman anyway. What do engineers know about human nature?” He blows on his tea and leans toward his desk. “I mean, you need your engineers. But at the helm, you need an idea guy, a psychologist. I started Toler Solutions so I could do big things—work on the future of technology, especially the way we’ll be interacting with technology. And it’s clear to me that conversing robots are a key part of that future. The Japanese are way ahead of us on this. They bond socially with robots. Robots look after their elderly. They’ve got robots as candy stripers. It’s brilliant. They’ve also made the leap toward accepting intimate relationships between humans and nonhuman objects. You read the Times article on the man in love with his pillowcase?”
I did. It was deeply disturbing. But to be fair the pillowcase had a cartoon character on it. “I think he was actually in love with a cartoon character.”
“But she needed a physical form,” he says. “Nothing elaborate, obviously—just a pillowcase. They call it 2-D love. But 2-D won’t cut it for most of us. We’re going to need 3-D, interaction. The next step—and this is five years away, maybe ten—is romantic relationships with robots. Your desires and needs being met by them. Don’t give me that look. It’ll be better than any relationship you’ve been in before. The ideal relationship. The cooking, the backrubs, the patient listening, the sex. All on your schedule. And it won’t matter if you’ve brushed your teeth. You won’t have to go to the gym. There won’t be any shenanigans with the pool boy or pool girl. It’ll be a profound, profound shift in the market.”
The market. I thought he was going to say the world. “Romance with robots is the next step?”
He opens a desk drawer and removes what looks like a purple plastic flashlight, sliding it handle first toward me. “It’s never been used—don’t worry.” This, of course, is just the kind of sentence to make one worry. The exterior has even ridges for grip; it’s about a foot and a half long. I leave it on the desk, but spin it around to a surprise. Where the light would be there is a lavender-colored silicone model of a vagina.
“Touch it,” he says.
“Yes?” I say, though I mean no.
“Tell me what you think.”
“It’s interesting.”
“Do we need to reschedule again?” he says. His voice is serious, almost menacing. I know he’s jerking me around, and he knows that I know that he’s jerking me around. But this knowledge changes nothing. I’ve been sent to get money; he has money. Power dynamics don’t get much clearer. I press the right labia with my thumb. It’s high-quality silicone, very smooth, as firm as the stress balls I use for carpal tunnel.
“It doesn’t feel real.”
He takes up the flashlight, points at his face as if he’s going to tell a ghost story. He pokes it absently. “It’s better than real,” he says. He doesn’t sound insulted so much as doubtful. “You need lubrication obviously. It’s a primitive device.”
“It’s purple.”
“And I’ll tell you why.” He lowers the “flashlight,” then flicks it across the desk with such speed I catch it in my lap. “Guess how long they’ve been making these? Since World War II. But they never sold. Why? They were flesh-colored. They even had fake hair on them. Stiff black bristles like a shoe brush. I’m serious. But then a very clever company started making them in purple, bristle-free, now they’re in every frat house in the country. They’re standard issue for the thirty and under set. You might have one.”
“I’m over thirty.”
He nods, but I’m not sure my comment makes any sense. It’s true I don’t own one of these, but why don’t I? If the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he can’t sit quietly in his own room, then here’s a device to keep man quiet in his room. I find the frank masturbatoriness unsettling, but dear Lord, I hope it’s not because I fear sex toys interfere with my limbic click.
“Well, you’re the holdout, I guess. But the color is key. The kids think they’re hilarious. When they were flesh-colored they were just creepy. It was like masturbating with a prosthetic hand.” He leans back, his palms in prayer position under his chin. “Now it’s just whatever. A thing you do.”
“I wouldn’t call that romance,” I say.
“It’s a start.” He shakes a finger at me. “True, we probably won’t fall in love with something with no eyes. Eyes are kind of a basic requirement. But let’s break this romance question down like businessmen. Forget the evolutionary point of view—women like providers, men like fertile wombs, blah, blah. That’s lazy academic thinking. The only evolutionary benefit of love is pair-bonding to aid in the raising of offspring, something other species accomplish much more efficiently. Eagles, gibbons, swans—you name it. From an evolutionary point of view we don’t need love to perpetuate our genes. We don’t need love to raise our children. So is love just a random emergent property? Maybe. Maybe it’s a social construct. Who knows. What’s important from our point of view, again as businessmen, is that even if love is an illusion, it’s an illusion more powerful than reality. This is where engineers will go astray, and I’m telling you, this is where Henry will go astray. He’ll think the scientific reality is what’s important when it’s beside the point. I’m kind of in the business of love, you might say. So I’m going to give you my own working theory—this one based on exhaustive couples research. We’ll call it a present to you. Love is about acquisition and deal-making. You have certain assets. You want to make sure you get the best deal for your assets. This is the fundamental human behavior rom
ance is built on. You know when you see some middle-aged schlump with a beautiful Russian wife? You think, wow, she must close her eyes and go to her happy place. But you’re wrong. She doesn’t see him in the same way. He’s Marlboro. He’s Harley-Davidson. He’s freedom. This is all enormously attractive to her. After a few years she gets the swing of the U.S. and cans him. We’ll say she was a craven fortune hunter, but we won’t be right. She had genuine feeling for him—the feeling of having made a good deal. Then her personal capital went way up. She was suddenly making a bad deal.”
“He’d be primed for the purchase of a sex robot,” I say. Then I wonder what’s possessed me.
“Here’s the tricky part, though, from a business point of view. The main mechanism of love and attraction might be deal-making, but we can’t say that. Falling in love with a robot can’t be like being super-psyched you got a Tesla. The minute you phrase the transaction as a transaction, the magic is gone. So rather than think about love as the kind of major purchase decision it is—how does this model compare to other models in my price range—we project some ideal qualities onto the beloved. One, this person or thing cares for me. Two, this person or thing speaks to my deepest self. Part one is easy. Need fulfillment. You’ve got your physical needs”—he points at the “flashlight”—“you feel bonded to the person or thing that meets those needs. That’s basically marriage in four-fifths of the world. Bot-wise, we’ve got that one figured out—those challenges are just engineering. But it’s part two—this person or thing speaks to my deepest self—that’s the conundrum. That other fifth of the world—the advanced people, the rich people. Europeans, Americans, Japanese to some extent. How can we get them to see themselves—see their ideal of themselves—in a robot?”
I wait for him to answer his own question, but he doesn’t. “Make it purple?”
“Come on. Give me some of that MBA genius.”
I think about my own life, my own fallings in love. I doubt it’s been free of projection. But if I’ve mistaken Rachel for a lost soul or suspected Erin of terminal unhappiness I wouldn’t say I was projecting my ideal self. “Most of us need a personality to work with, I think.”
He leans forward, pounds his hands affirmatively on the desk. “A pillowcase isn’t going to do it. We need something to work with. Imagine this—you buy your bot. Fairly realistic-looking. Gorgeous. Will look after your physical needs, all that. But in the three months you’re waiting for this miracle of manufacturing, you log in to a secure site every day and have a chat with her or him. You chat back and forth and you give feedback. It could be a thumbs-up or -down, or it could be a starred rating system. But whenever the bot says something you don’t like you thumbs-down it. Whenever it says something you like, you thumbs-up it.”
“Like Pandora.”
“They’ve got the Music Genome Project. We’ll have the Personality Genome Project. If you like sweet nothings, then you’ll like A. If you like sharp political discussion, then you’ll like B. And if our model doesn’t suit you you can give us the feedback and our system gets smarter. You’ll be creating the ideal partner for your downtime, and we’ll be refining our systems more and more. We already have all the basic profiles to start with.”
I know. We used his profiling tests to frame Dr. Bassett.
“This is a truly dark view of the future,” I say.
He bursts into laughter, leans back in his chair. “Okay, that’s my working theory of love. What’s yours?”
And now I see why I’ve been called here. I’m an easy mark. I have a personal, probably emotional connection to the project. I am not worried about the everlasting perpetuity of my name (at least yet). I don’t have a reputation to uphold. I just have a computer—based on my father—that won’t speak. Still, it’s not exactly my theory of love. I’m not even sure it’s about love, or that it even qualifies as a theory. It’s a little too faith based. So what in God’s name is Toler going to accomplish with it? What are we going to accomplish with it?
“I may have come underprepared,” I say. “Livorno told me you had already signed on.”
Toler sighs. “I love Henry, but he’s an idea man who’s run out of ideas. I, on the other hand, am an idea man with engineers. The very best from the very best schools.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Of course he does. And he’s the competition.
He pulls on his lips, puts his hand down in his lap, waiting. “Well, I certainly understand your loyalty to Henry,” he says. “Hell, I feel it myself, and I’m not known for my sensitive side. So tell him I appreciate the invitation to invest, but I don’t think it’s quite the right time.”
“Why do you need this theory?”
He puts his elbows on the table.
“I mean,” I say. “There are lots of other theories. There are surely better ones.”
“That’s undoubtedly true. But how can I go mano a mano against Henry if we have different starting materials?”
“Easy. We’re trying to beat the Turing test. You’re trying to beat the Turing test.”
“No. I’m trying to beat that old bag, Henry Livorno, who gave me a C in graduate school. And he’s two years ahead of me on his project. But after this little head start, I want the contest to be totally fair. I’ll hand over gobs of cash. I’ll even send one of my top engineers over to help.”
I’ve never been much of a chess player (though my father did insist we learn how to play), but I try to think three moves ahead here. Is there any harm in giving him our idea, an idea that is really more like a Band-Aid? An unproven Band-Aid? There are many things Toler still won’t have. The Sins. The stack. My father’s journals. In other words, most of the project. And we aren’t anywhere with Laham back to Jakarta and Dr. Bassett collecting dust.
“Okay,” I say. “Are we going to make a deal? I give you the theory and you hand over whatever money you and Henry have discussed?”
“I’m a man of my word.” He says this with a tired sneer.
“Well, it’s kind of Gnostic,” I say. “It’s a universal positive inclination. Rather than no—yes.”
Toler looks alarmed. “What are you speaking—Klingon?”
“It has to do with the limbic system. The basic idea is that you make the computer always seek connection. Click and stay clicked.”
He laughs. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“That’s it.”
“The limbic system,” he says.
“Yes.”
“You know that doesn’t really exist.”
I nod, but this is news to me. The limbic system doesn’t exist?
“What does Henry like about this?” He’s speaking to himself. “The scientism? Is it easier to model?”
I say nothing.
“Well,” he says, reaching over to shake. “You’ve officially conned me out of two hundred thousand dollars and a top engineer.”
“Not Jenn, I hope.”
He looks surprised. “You’ve got a good memory for names.” It sounds like an accusation. “Guy’s name is Robert.” Toler stands and walks stiffly out his office door, a hitch in his left hip. I put down my tea and follow. He limps quickly down the hall, knocking on an unmarked metal door. When it opens, he signals for me to enter.
The room is the size of a high school chemistry lab, brightly lit. The walls are lined with stainless steel tables; on top of the tables are small boxes holding tiny rods and motors and springs. “This is Neill.” Toler is speaking to an alarmed man in a white coat. “Show him.” I’m directed to a project in the corner. It’s another silicone vagina, this one blue.
“Put your finger in there,” Toler says.
I sigh, taking a minute to establish to Toler, to myself, to the universe that I’d rather not. Then I put my finger in there. Robert flicks a switch. The device startles and
begins making a rhythmic humming noise. The walls of the fake vagina undulate, pressing on my knuckles. A firm squeezing, not quite a sucking.
“You can’t even get that kind of muscle control in Thailand,” Toler says.
• • •
TANGLING IN THE SHEETS with Jenn, I think about that motorized vagina. She doesn’t do anything like that—she doesn’t do anything with her kegel muscles, except at the very end when she’s coming. If the flesh were real enough, the movement smooth enough, could sex be like this with a robot? I grip her thigh. What if it gave exactly like that? What if the face looked like hers—upper lip raised, chin thrown back? The panting, the syncopated moans. It would always come exactly when you did.
Like Jenn, but blue. Could I ever love such a thing?
We roll onto our backs, a cool wind rustles the curtains.
“That was great.” She runs a fingernail down her own chest.
“We’re pretty good, aren’t we?” I say. We know all the passionless moves. We’re like a championship foxtrot team.
“We are,” she says. She rolls over and stands, walking naked to the bathroom. She flicks on the light and leaves the door open while she pees. She calls to me, “I need to ask a favor.”
Oh, boy. “The answer is yes, but not now.”
“I’m serious.” I hear paper detached from the roll, the toilet flushes. She turns off the light, fills the bathroom door with her black silhouette. “I want you to watch something.”
I sit up and take a drink of the gin and tonic she poured me earlier. It’s gone flat; I catch a fruit fly in my teeth. I’m filled with unexpected dread. “Of course,” I say. “What are you going to show me?”
“A brief video.”
“Is it sexy?”
“Right. Funny.” She fumbles around her wardrobe for her glasses, and then slips into a T-shirt and yoga pants. She comes over and takes away my glass, carrying it through the kitchen and into the living room.
A Working Theory of Love Page 21
