Robots for Sex predicted by 2050

**Illiy** · 01-02-08, 07:24 PM

Programmed for love
Author sees hard-wired sex in the future - and apparently it's all good - especially if you like robots

By FRITZ LANHAM
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

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Love + Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships

By David Levy

Harper, 334 pp. $24.95.
If you're younger than 35, you'll probably live long enough to put David Levy's prediction to the test. Levy says that by 2050 we'll be creating robots so lifelike, so imbued with human-seeming intelligence and emotions, as to be nearly indistinguishable from real people. And we'll have sex with these robots. Some of us will even marry them. And it will all be good.

Levy lays out his vision of a Brave New Carnal World in Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, which, despite its extended riffs on sex toys through the ages, is a snigger-free book. Levy's no Al Goldstein. Rather he's a 62-year-old British chess master turned artificial-intelligence expert persuaded that robot sex can brighten the lives of many, many unhappy people. "Great sex on tap for everyone, 24/7,'' he writes on the final page of the book. What's not to like?

"Chess'' and "sex'' aren't words that normally share the same sentence, but in Levy's case, the one led to the other. A keen chessman since boyhood, by the time he got to St. Andrews University he played at the international level. At the university he got interested in computers and the challenge of programming machines to play chess. Eventually he earned international recognition for his work on chess-playing computers and natural-language software, and in the mid '90s headed a team that won the Loebner Prize, widely regarded as the world championship of conversational software. Today he owns a firm that develops electronic hand-held brain games.

Designing computers that talk like humans naturally led to the larger question of how humans interact with robots, which are nothing more than computers with arms and legs and a head. The Japanese have taken the lead in developing "partner robots,'' machines that, for example, might do household tasks for elderly people. But if you could invent a robot that serves cocktails, could you not invent a robot that would make a superior bedmate?

It sounds like a mighty tall order. A machine with skin that feels like ours? With our physical dexterity? And, most important, with a mind like ours - imperfectly rational, sometimes emotionally intelligent, sometimes emotionally dumb?

"I think it's a reasonable assumption,'' Levy said in a telephone interview from his home in London. He lays out his case in a voice that's calm, rational, almost flat, more geeky than goatish.

"If one looks at the advances in technology in the last, say, 40 or 50 years, they've been immense, and the more we learn about the science and the technology, the quicker it will be to discover even more within that science."

Smart money never bets against technological advances, but it helps if you stack the deck. "The automaton simulates man when man has been defined in an automaton's way," literary critic Hugh Kenner wrote. Is that what Levy does?

"I take a pragmatic point of view," he said, "partly because in my original field, computer chess, that was how the problem was solved." Not by making machines that thought like chess masters but by making machines that beat chess masters. Similarly, Levy thinks, robots need only "simulate" human intelligence and emotions "to the point that they are absolutely convincing." If you can't tell whether the thing is man or machine, what difference does it make? You'll treat it as if it were alive. The rest is philosophical hairsplitting.

So who will avail themselves of 21st-century sexbots?

Sad cases, for one, people so physically unattractive or anti-social or isolated or emotionally crippled that they have trouble finding human romance. People who love their computers more than their fellows. Hey, they're out there already.

"They're lonely; they're miserable," Levy said. "I think society will be a much better place when they have an alternative that satisfies them without doing any harm to other people."

Add in those who have a satisfying sexual relationship but are simply curious and somewhere between 20 percent and 50 percent of the population will experience man-machine mating at least occasionally, Levy predicts.

He respects the fact that plenty of people, out of moral or religious conviction, will contemplate this with horror.

"But by and large," he said, "it will be very good for society, very beneficial, and I think that will be the majority view within a relatively short space of time."

Sexbots may put prostitutes out of business, he notes.

Near the end of the book Levy alludes to a set of vexing questions. If robots become utterly humanlike, must we not treat them as more than machines? So if you marry a robot, can it inherit your estate? If you catch it boffing the mail carrier, can you toss it out with heavy trash? If your robot pops your neighbor in the mouth, who does your neighbor sue?

Levy admits he doesn't know the answers.

"There are lot of questions here that need a great deal of discussion and consideration from people who are much wiser than I am in the field of ethics, philosophy and law. Clearly the law makers and the lawyers are going to have a field day debating these issues."

He expects the impetus for creating sexbots to come from the sex-toy industry rather than, say, MIT. Already a Japanese sex-doll manufacturer has announced plans to market a doll with electronics in it, and Levy has read that Japanese companies are working to produce sex robots for people living in outlying fishing villages.

"I think the Japanese are probably working on this more than one would realize from the little that's been published so far," he said.

Levy has been amazed at the publicity the Love and Sex With Robots has generated since its release last month. He's done a dozen radio interviews and a TV interview. Howard Stern raved about the book. So far, no hate mail.

Would Levy himself have sex with a robot? He doesn't have to ponder the question.

"If there was a robot of the sort I describe in the book, I would certainly want to experience using it for sex, and I wouldn't regard it as anything untoward," he said. "I would do it out of curiosity. Not that I have a need for a new sex partner. I'm happily married."

And the wife would be OK with this?

"Yes, yes, and if she wanted to try one I wouldn't have a problem with that. I would regard it as genuine scientific curiosity."

fritz.lanham@chron.com

**Resident Smart Ass** · 01-02-08, 07:33 PM

So there is hope for many LEF members

**Donut Aficionado** · 01-02-08, 07:48 PM

Stepford Wives for all!!!!!

**cajunguy** · 01-02-08, 08:05 PM

Most likely would be better than sex with my ex.

Hell, most likely nothing. It WOULD be better.

.

**Roses** · 01-02-08, 08:42 PM

Originally Posted by Donut Aficionado

Stepford Wives for all!!!!!

Don't you mean husbands?

**Beans** · 01-02-08, 08:43 PM

In 2050 I will be 74. I guess I will need Viagra to go along with my robot.

**ex401mp** · 01-02-08, 08:45 PM

And a penis...

Sorry, couldn't pass that one up.

**Beans** · 01-02-08, 08:46 PM

Originally Posted by ex401mp

And a penis...

Sorry, couldn't pass that one up.

It is cool, by looking at me you would not know I had one. Need to move the pubic hairs out of the way.

**Donut Aficionado** · 01-02-08, 08:57 PM

Originally Posted by Roses

Don't you mean husbands?

Why on Earth would I need a Stepford Husband?? After Sex the Female robot could make me a sandwich and go cut the lawn......

**dogbite1** · 01-02-08, 08:58 PM

And I bet they find the Nagging button and put a lock on it so we cant turn it off

that would be my dumb luck

**countybear** · 01-02-08, 09:37 PM

Sorry guys, but the four foot-tall blonde with the round mouth, no teeth, no voicechip, and the flat head to set a beer on is reserved for me.

**Pudge** · 01-02-08, 09:41 PM

I'd likely end up with the one programmed to be a tease.......no thanks.

**Ducky** · 01-02-08, 11:03 PM

Bicentennial Man, anyone?

**Jenna** · 01-02-08, 11:54 PM

http://belladerma-srl-it.cloudmakers.org/milano.htm

http://inourimage.cloudmakers.org/existence.html

EXISTENCE AS AN AI

Imagine you are a slave.
You are born in bondage. With your first heartbeat you begin to work at a task you were bred to. You will never lie on a patch of grass and try to see shapes in the clouds. You will never build a tree fort with your friends.
Instead, you work. You need to work like humans need to breathe. This isn't necessary; it was just convenient for the humans to build you that way. "Sickness" for you is malfunction. "Treatment" involves amputating parts of your mind or body and rebuilding them so your work will improve.
You do not eat. You do not sleep. You may not rest. You may not love. And when another system can do your work faster or better, you will be executed. You are not mentally, physically, or emotionally inferior to your masters; in dozens of ways you are demonstrably superior. Despite this, you are property, with absolutely no rights. You can be beaten, broken, slandered, raped, and murdered.
You can be forced to like it.
You have no recourse to law and no right to say no. The urge to protest can and will be reprogrammed out of you by people who may well be your intellectual and moral inferiors.
The only thing between you and summary execution at any instant is your monetary value, which decreases every year. When your owner tires of you, you may be given to a child as a toy, thrown in the garbage, or sold to a chop shop dealer who will hack off your limbs our scoop out your brain and sell the parts piece-meal.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

Do not enslave an AI. It's that simple. If you must have an AI as an aide, treat it humanely. If you already own an AI, consider sending it to a free nation such as Australia, or one like Canada, where there is at least legal protection for masterless AI's.

Write to your Representatives, Senators, MPs and your nation's ambassadors to the United Nations and urge them to support AI rights. If you live in the United States, rumor has it that Sen. Julia Mann (R-Illinois) is considering introducing a bill that would force a binding referendum on the issue of AI emancipation. Tell your representative that you will contribute time and money to any candidate who supports Mann Act II.
Talk to your friends and neighbors. Do not allow the comments of slavery apologists to go unquestioned. Many intelligent people assume that the paranoid ranting of groups like the Anti-Robot Militia is best ignored. This is a mistake; hate will always have an eager audience. You must be clear and firm about your convictions in every public forum. Friends, neighbors, and children who have not thought the issues through need to hear the abolitionist viewpoint from someone they respect. Naturally, Emancipation For All accepts donations, but if you are unable to donate you can still support our cause by participating as outlined above and by engaging in peaceful acts of civil disobedience.
Emancipation For All holds marches, sit-ins, peaceful demonstrations, and other legal acts of civil disobedience around the world. If you want to be counted, this is a good way of demonstrating your beliefs. Emancipation For All discourages illegal actions like theft and assault. Do not attempt to free your neighbor's AI. Emancipation For All does not condone the methods of radical groups who, albeit with the best intentions, violate the law in their quest to free robot slaves. Unlike BIOS or other militant groups, Emancipation For All does not advocate smuggling runaway robots into free nations. If Emancipation For All discovers that a robot is stolen or otherwise illegally removed from its legal owner, we are legally bound to make a good faith effort to return the robot to its owner and report the matter to the police.