I was flipping absent-mindedly through an issue of ‘Newsweek’ magazine on board a flight home, my mind partially making a mental list of all my chores for the next few days, when a headline quote caught my eye, “I Believe That It Will Become Perfectly Normal for People to Have Sex With Robots”. Sex with robots? How disgusting, how sad, I thought. But the headline writer had done his/her job well – I stopped thinking of my chores and read the article. It was on David Levy, artificial intelligence expert, and his book, titled “Love and Sex with Robots.”
If I found the idea uncomfortable, I was nevertheless intrigued. The article talked about kissing through computers, which would put phone sex out of business. Apparently, if you kissed pressure-sensitive artificial lips linked to your computer, the computer would simulate the movements of the mouth and that would be replicated in the computer connected elsewhere that your beloved is logged on to, and thus, one could kiss long distance.
What really fascinated me was his conviction, in this article, that a robot would be appealing as a “companion, lover, spouse”, especially for those people who find it easier to relate to their computer than to form human relationships. It described, in the future, robots endowed with emotions, moods, personalities, body warmth, synthesized speech, moving limbs, being quite routine. (Interestingly, the article seemed to refer more to female robots. Would such male robots be equally successful, I wonder).
I shut the magazine, and tried to analyze why I was feeling disturbed. It read like some fantasy story, yet he may well be right. People may well welcome such changes, and not always for sexual reasons. After all, when I travel, I try to Skype or Facetime my husband and children everyday, and I long to hug and kiss them. I keep in touch with friends across the world through Facebook. My children, including my 5 year old daughter, navigate an Ipad better than I do.
For the next generation, computers are an integral part of daily existence. They do not know a world without computers. Would it really be so different, then, to kiss, even love a robot?
I think I felt so offended because it made me question what remains of us as humans. Everything is computerized today, but that’s work. Computers can’t feel, they can’t love, they can’t be compassionate – these are traits that distinguish us as humans, what makes us so special. So far.
Yet, it’s a fact that just as computers are changing our world, they are also changing our brains, our minds. We are evolving, and we still don’t know exactly how. Is living with computers slowly making us less human? Do the human brain’s neural networks start connecting differently, so that we feel more at ease and relate more with a computerized environment than a human one? Can computers really replace the benefit of a human touch? It’s not impossible – there are some reports, for example, that Facebook actually makes us less social. A few years ago, I remember reading a BBC web report where they interviewed an Oxford Professor whose studies had shown that people’s regular interactions on Facebook led to short attention spans, inability to empathise, and even distorts their sense of identity. (But it didn’t stop me using Facebook to connect to my friends!). On the other hand, there are many reports that reading, the old fashioned way of entertaining ourselves, leads to development of imagination, critical thinking and reflection – all that we feel makes humans superior.
So as our world gets more and more computerised, as computers become more like humans, will human beings too evolve to be more like computers? Will the lines finally be blurred to such an extent that you will even marry robots? Is that how the human race will finally end – not with a great nuclear explosion or a giant meteor hitting earth or even climate change, but because we will eventually all become robots more than humans? Very scary thought. I’d better practice how I will greet my granddaughter-in-law, the robot.
