by David Levy
Several researchers and companies, particularly in Japan, have been developing the concept of robots as partners for people, and “partner robots are beginning to participate in human society by performing a variety of tasks and functions.”7 Takayuki Kanda and his team at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories in Kyoto recognize the importance of finding common ground between humans and robots in order to establish relationships and to build them over time, just as normal human-human relationships evolve with time, and they have identified various goals in robotics research that will need to be achieved in order to enable robots to exhibit sufficiently humanlike behavior patterns to engender human empathy. One of these goals is for robots to recognize individuals: “It is vital that two parties recognize each other for their relationship to develop…. Although person identification is an essential requirement for a partner robot, current visual and auditory sensing technologies cannot reliably support it. Therefore an unfortunate consequence is that a robot may behave the same with everyone…. Misidentification can ruin a relationship. For example, a person may be hurt or offended if the robot were to call the person by someone else’s name.” Another capability that must be improved in order to facilitate smooth human-robot interaction is language communication. “Whereas speaking is not so difficult for the partner robot, listening and recognizing human utterances is one of the most difficult challenges in human-robot interaction. Although some of the computer interfaces successfully employ speech input via microphone, it is far more difficult for the robots to recognize human utterances, because the robots suffer from noise from surrounding humans (background talk) and the robot body (motor noise)…. We cannot expect ideal language perception ability like humans. However, we believe that robots can maintain interaction with humans, if they can recognize other human behaviors, such as distance, touching actions, and visual movements, in addition to utterances.”8
Another feature of robots deemed necessary by these Japanese researchers for successful, natural-appearing human-robot interaction is a body that looks human. “People have bodies that afford sophisticated means of expression through diverse channels. We believe that a robot partner, ideally, would have a humanlike body. A robot with a humanlike body allows people to intuitively understand its gestures, which in turn causes people to behave unconsciously as if they were communicating with a human…. Eye contact, gesture observation, and imitation in human-robot interactions greatly increase people’s understanding of utterances…. Close synchronization of embodiedcommunication also plays an important role in establishing a communicative relation between the speaker and the listeners…. We believe that in designing an interactive robot, its body should be based on the human body to produce the most effective communication.”9
A recent intervention in the attempt to create humanlike robots has come from Korea, at the hands of the very same academic who invented robot soccer.* Kim Jong-Hwan has developed robot software that incorporates a computer form of DNA. Fourteen simulated chromosomes, occupying only a tiny amount of computer memory,† enable Kim’s robots to exhibit up to seventy-seven human behavior patterns, which is probably more than many couch potatoes have in their repertoires. Kim’s chromosomes are also intended to give robots the ability to reason and to feel desire and lust, just like us.
I fully expect that in the shorter term many of the ideas and predictions expressed in this book will be met with a certain amount of doubt, or downright disbelief, and possibly hostility. To my mind, those who doubt the possibility of computer life or robot life lack a breadth of vision similar to those who, in the 1960s, doubted the possibility of an artificial intelligence. One of the most famous outpourings of doubt expressed about AI was triggered by Berkeley philosopher Hubert Dreyfus’s 1972 book, What Computers Can’t Do. Dreyfus had previously announced, in a report for the Rand Corporation written in 1965, that artificial intelligence was a fraud, describing it as alchemy. And in 1972 he insisted, as an example of this “fraud,” that “computers can’t play real chess,” a statement that Garry Kasparov and many other leading grandmasters now know, to their cost, to be absurd. A similar degree of skepticism has also been applied to many of the advances in scientific, sociological, and philosophical thinking through the ages. One of the best-known examples of this was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution which, in 1925, led to the famous “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee, when the renowned lawyer Clarence Darrow fought to allow Darwinism to be taught in schools. Even in the twenty-first century, there are objections being raised in some American states to such teachings.
Just as there are still those who dispute Darwinism, there will be those whose doubts and hostility toward what is written here will similarly emanate from their religious views. I do not expect the acceptance of love and sex with robots to become universal overnight. On the contrary, it would not surprise me if a significant proportion of readers deride these ideas until my predictions have been proved correct. It is inevitable that a measure of hostility will be expressed toward such concepts, just as there was hostility toward the “ridiculous” notion that the earth is round rather than flat, toward the suggestion that the sun orbits our planet rather than vice versa, and toward the evolutionary studies that have shown man to be related to the apes. Such hostility always takes its time to dissipate, but dissipate it does. We like to think of ourselves as “special” beings—special in the sense that our consciousness raises us above every other form of life. But as psychologists, brain researchers, and other scientists learn more and more about the workings of the human mind, making them clearly explicable where now they are shrouded in mystery, then and only then will it become generally accepted that, marvelous though the human brain is, it is a kind of biological machine that can be analyzed and simulated, even to the point of simulating our emotions.
Those among you who are skeptical might regard some or all of my forecasts as being highly unlikely, or much further away in time than I am suggesting, or even impossible. But to take such a position would be to ignore the increasingly rapid rate of progress in artificial intelligence, materials science, and the various other relevant areas of technology. Given the dramatic technological changes and advances that the world has witnessed during the past fifty years, any assumptions of unlikelihood or impossibility regarding our technological future are at the very least risky, and most probably unjustified. Would those among you who are skeptics have believed, fifty years ago, that the accolade awarded annually by Time magazine for the Man or Woman of the Year would, in 1983, be given instead to the computer? And is it any more unlikely that by 2033 this same accolade will be awarded to the android—a humanlike robot?
In her groundbreaking book The Second Self, Sherry Turkle eloquently makes the point that we should be asking the question “not what the computer will be like in the future, but instead, what will we be like? What kind of people are we becoming?” That is where this book begins. Accepting that huge technological advances will be achieved by around 2050, my thesis is this: Robots will be hugely attractive to humans as companions because of their many talents, senses, and capabilities. They will have the capacity to fall in love with humans and to make themselves romantically attractive and sexually desirable to humans. Robots will transform human notions of love and sexuality. I am not suggesting that most people will eschew love and sex with humans in favor of relationships with robots, though some undoubtedly will. But what does seem to me to be entirely reasonable and extremely likely—nay, inevitable—is that many humans will expand their horizons of love and sex, learning, experimenting, and enjoying new forms of relationship that will be made possible, pleasurable, and satisfying through the development of highly sophisticated humanoid robots. This is the answer to Turkle’s question “What kind of people are we becoming?” Humans will fall in love with robots, humans will marry robots, and humans will have sex with robots, all as (what will be regarded as) “normal” extensions of our feelings of love and sexual desire for other hu
mans. Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined. Love and sex with robots on a grand scale are inevitable. This book explains why.
PART ONE
Love with Robots
We ask [of the computer] not just about where we stand in nature, but about where we stand in the world of artefact. We search for a link between who we are and what we have made, between who we are and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy with our own creations, we might become.
—Sherry Turkle, The Second Self
1 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:
The emotional and behavioral dynamics of infant-caregiver relationships and adult romantic relationships are governed by the same biological system.
The kinds of individual differences observed in infant-caregiver relationships are similar to the differences observed in romantic relationships.
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.
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.
Attachment to a material possession can develop into a stronger relationship as a result of the possession’s repeated use and the owner’s interaction with it. This phenomenon is known as “material possession attachment.”2 The process by which this happens is similar to the way in which we develop our understanding of and feelings for people as we get to know them over time. Initially, of course, a material possession is nothing more than a commodity that is purchased and probably comes to “live” in our home. As we use it, play with it, and so forth, we get to know it, and gradually it might become less and less of a commodity, more and more a part of our life. The computer is no longer simply a computer, it quickly becomes my computer. Not so much “my” in the sense of its being owned by me, but more in the sense of its being the particular computer with which I associate myself, the one that I feel is part of my being. Computers, in fact, provide an excellent example of this interpretation of “my”—when people go into an Internet café or into the computer room at school or college, they will usually gravitate toward the same computer they have used in the past, even though all the machines in the room might be, to all practical purposes, identical. They head straight for “their” computer, the one for which they feel they have some affinity, the o
ne with which they subconsciously feel they have already developed some sort of relationship.
As an owner uses an object and interacts with it more and more over time, so this personal attention applied to the object endows it with a special meaning for the owner. Several psychology researchers have pointed to this creation-of-meaning process, among whom Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton have been the primary advocates, referring to this special meaning as “psychic energy.” As the owner invests more psychic energy in an object, more meaning is attached to the object, it becomes more important to its owner, and the stronger is the attachment that the owner feels for the object.
The commodity thus becomes increasingly personalized to its owner through repeated use and interaction, and as it does so, it takes on, within the owner’s mind, an aura of uniqueness. Consciously the owner knows full well that his computer is more or less exactly the same as millions of other computers in the world, but subconsciously there develops in the mind of the owner the notion that this particular computer, his computer, is unique, it is personal to him. And now that the commodity is no longer viewed as a commodity but as something unique, something personalized, it becomes part of its owner’s being, “symbolizing autobiographical meanings.”3 The computer, if that is the commodity, becomes irreplaceable in the mind of its owner, even though clearly it could be replaced by another computer of the same make and model with the same amount of memory and the same operating system.* This “uniqueness” will often cause the owner to be unwilling to replace it, “even with an exact replica, because the consumer feels that the replica cannot sustain the same meaning as the original.”4 Such possessions thereby become endowed with personal meaning that connects the object with its owner—the object in a sense becomes part of the owner—and this personal meaning is what is called “material possession attachment.”
