Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex Robots

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Can a sex robot really fulfil our needs in the bedroom? And what attempts have been made in the past?Sex robots may sound like a thing of the future, but for centuries humans have been fascinated by their desire for intimacy with the inanimate.From Greek tales of steamy encounters with wax statues to beautifully crafted sex dolls with AI technology; Kate Lister is joined Betwixt The Sheets by archeologist turned computer scientist and expert on Human Computer Interaction, Kate Devlin, to discuss this aspiration of trying to create the “perfect” mate and more.*WARNING there are naughty words and sexual content in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Anisha Deva.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My lovely betwixters, this is Kate Lister. I'm jumping in with your weekly, byweekly, actually, fair dues warning. Fair dues, this episode is going to contain a lot of naughtiness. And it really is actually, and it's not even all of my fault, because I'm speaking to Kate Devlin, who gives me the giggles quite badly and only encourages the swearing

and the general disgraceful conversations of filth and awfulness. We're talking about sex robots, so they'll give me some indication, of what's coming your way. There will be adult themes, there will be naughty words, there will be graphic descriptions and horrendous incidences of both of us oversharing. And if you can cope with that, then let's get into it.

From hovering to putting bottle caps on, robots are being proved upon all the time to do jobs formally done by humans. But now they're capable of a whole different type of sucking and screwing. The arrival of the sex robot. It was inevitable, really, isn't it? As soon as human beings come up with a new technology,

it will be turned to pornographic sex purposes pretty damn quick. That's the future, possibly. But it also has a history. What is the history of the sex robot? How long have humans been trying to have sex with bits of machinery? And where did it all come from? Well, let's find out. I'm game if you are.

What are you a quality man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the money. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel no time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kate Lister. Today I am joined by Kate Devlin to find out about the long history of people trying to create

their perfect partner and have sex with inanimate machinery. It does have a history, I promise you. What were the ancient and medieval answers to sex robots? How have these creations been imagined in films and books? And what are our current relationship with these robots like? Let's find out. And welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. I'm only here with Kate Flipping Devlin, you fabulous woman.

How are you? I'm very well, thank you, and I'm very excited about this. I'm so happy to talk to you because your research is endlessly fascinating. And I still don't know if there's, I mean, I'm sure there are other people researching what you're researching. But you are like the sex robot lady, the academic, the sex robot person. It haunts me. I'm typecast now. Absolutely typecast. I keep saying, but I do other things as well. And people are like, no, we don't want to hear about the sex robots. In fact, they got miscaptioned in, I think it was the Daily Mail who put up a picture of a sex robot.

and put my name under it, which I didn't know whether to be flattered or horrified. The Kate Devlin sex robot. Yeah, maybe that's the next step. Maybe I should license my likeness. No one would buy it. I would buy it. Oh, thanks. I would, I can tell the audience that Kate's really into wild swimming.

I would totally buy your robot equivalent to go swimming with. A wild swimming robot could be dangerous. You get electrocuted. That's a good point. This is why I'm not an engineer. But sex robots sound really future. futuristic and this is a history podcast. However, they actually have a surprisingly long history, do they not? They really do. The stories do anyway. We have stories going right back to the ancient

Greeks, this whole thing of trying to create a perfect artificial companion. It's a really compelling narrative and it's one that persists to this day, as we can see every time we watch a sci-fi movie with a femme fatal fembot in it. So there's a very strong compulsion to create the perfect woman. And it is very gendered. It is, generally talking about women and controlling women. As you said that, I had like flashbacks to my teenagers. And what was that weird science? That was one where they tried to create a woman in a lab.

Kelly LeBrock, yeah. Yes. Tweaking the boob size. Yeah. Because that's a fundamental part of every teenage movie in the 80s. So, yeah. And there's a whole heap of them like that. But I can't think of anywhere women,

are there anywhere women is trying to make a perfect man bot? Not really, no. I mean, we have got representations like Jiglojo from the AI film Spielberg's AI, but he's designed to pleasure women. He's almost a caricature because it's done in such a way that it's just about pleasure and he doesn't really have any other purpose. But it's also very romanticised too. So the male sex robots are kind of depicted as being romantic creatures, whereas the female ones are predicted as being sexy and wild. See, that's interesting, isn't it? Because to try and come up with the idea, well, what would the ideal man robot for women would be? We have to try and unpack this case of what is a woman's sexuality.

And that is a question that has not really been explored. We're much more comfortable with what they call the male gaze. Like we can see that, that's sexy, right? Tits and that and that does that and this goes in and that goes out and that's sexy. But like the trying to unpack what a woman would want from a sex robot is much, much harder, I think. It really is. I don't think anyone's ever really stopped to ask us. That's a good part. What would she want from a sex robot?

I mean, it could be anything. We could really make any kind of robot we want. We've got so many different types of smart materials. It doesn't have to look human. I asked people this at different events and I got some people to draw and design what their ideal one would be. It was really interesting because some people said, well, what if you had sort of sex toy body? And then on the top you had a screen where you could just read literotica, which I thought. What was great. What a lovely idea. Wow. That's a hell of a question, isn't it? But I suppose that you're kind of into, like a sex robot is effectively quite a visual thing, isn't it? Because it's just to look pretty and get shagged. Like, that's kind of what that is. Or is it not? You say that.

You say that. But actually, very interestingly, one of the things that seems to be happening with the sex robots that are in prototype or early development today, and I should pause here and say that there aren't really many out there in the world. It's really at a handful of workshops worldwide, creating sex dolls with some animatronics in them. But they're selling them as companions. They are really emphasising the romantic aspects of this. And I have a wonderful PhD student, Chloe Locatelli, who's looking at this, and she's looking at the way in which these things are advertised and marketed, and really the kind of idea that it's almost, as she describes it, post-human sex work. But it's really placing the emphasis on this companion aspect. So you're not just

buying, if you buy a sex robot, you're not just buying something to have sex with. You're buying something that will understand you and listen to you and be there for you. It's the girlfriend experience. It is the girlfriend experience. And because of the AI, it can be adapted and personalized to you so you can have this chat bot that learns from your interactions. It's not particularly great right now, but the potential is there. But it's technology that's being developed by somebody. Because, yeah, I suppose like when you think about it, humans, we've been having sex with bits and machinery for a very long time. Very long time, yes. Right?

It's like that's what a vibrator is, ultimately, is it doesn't ask you how your day is, and it can't open jars. However, we could. Do you think we could? I think we could. I think we could. I'll put that on the list. Yeah, that's right. And so the electrone mechanical vibrator has been around since the late Victorian period, as you know.

And with a lot of myth around its origins, because there was a claim that it was, there to treat hysteria women. Of course, this is not actually evidence anywhere. This was one hypothesis, but it's really grasped the attention and people have run with that, but it's not actually founded in any evidence that I could find when I was researching it. But even before that, we have records, again, those ancient Greeks, they're up to it all the time, but we have texts that talk about the use of dildos, for example. Well, I mean, yeah, and it's everyone's kind of, older generations think they've invented sex, but you don't. It's the actual function of sex. feels nice if you rub that bit, that's remained pretty consistent since we first crawled out

the sludge. What does change is new mediums to explore that. Do you mean, like, like a sex robot sounds really new, but the concept of the sex doll of just trying to fucking inanimate object, which doesn't sound as high tech. Yeah, long history. Yeah, just this creation of a perfect individual for you. I think that's the thing that the sex robot in this humanoid form offers, that it is creating a partner of sorts, as opposed to the sex tech that is more disembodied, well, not disembodied, discrete body parts, let's say. And also we now have these AI companions that can talk dirty to you, not your voice assistance. You can try it with your voice assistants, but they are designed to rebuff you. In that Siri voice? Yeah, there are AI chatbots that are

emerging that are there for dirty talk. They are there for a sexual experience. But disembodied completely because they're just a piece of software. They can have abysabotts. They can have avatars, of course. What's the earliest records that you've found of, I know it gets difficult to find this stuff, but like the earliest records that you've got of something like, not a robot, but a sex doll, the earliest evidence of someone trying to create, what would you call it, an automaton? There are stories that go back to people having sexual experiences with statues. So there's a paper that came out in 1975 and it was called Perversions, ancient and modern. And it was about the classical evidence for statue sex. And apparently there's something like 11 accounts

from ancient Greece and one from Italy. Wow. And there are stories about people that lusts after statues. But this evidence is, it's not really verifiable. Although there are parapherias, apparently, that is people who are sexually excited by statues. There's endless things that turn everybody on. Absolutely, absolutely. We have stories from, we have Greek myths.

My favorite one is one of the earliest ones. And it's a woman who creates the statue, the likeness of a man, her whole. husband. So she was, Launa mea and her husband was killed in battle. And she really wanted him back. They hadn't been married long. So she prayed to the gods. They sent him back for three hours because the gods are capricious like that. That's mean. Isn't it? Isn't that really goes? Oh, welcome back. Oh, you got to go. And then so she decided to create a likeness of him. And some of this story say that he was made out of wax. Some of them say it was made out of bronze. And then the bit as interesting is that the story says she took it to bed with her and, in quotation marks,

interacted with it. Right. Okay. Yeah, but it did not end well. These stories about sex robots and companions rarely do. Wouldn't if it was made a wax, no. Yeah, well, well, what happened was one of the servants was spying on her. Okay, no one seems to call out the servants' behavior here. One of the servants was spying on her and saw this through the keyhole and told her father, and her father came in and the awkward, her father came in and, yeah, threw the likeness on a fire, and she threw herself after it. No, that's just, that's sad. I've got favourite dildos, but I don't think...

I'm not that attached. Crying as the bin man taken away. No! Right, so that's a really early one. And then we've got like the Pygmalion, of course. Pygmalion, yeah, so that's a story told by Ovid, the Roman poet. He's telling a Greek tale of Pygmalion who was a bit messed up. Pigmalion's a little bit in Sally.

So he really didn't like the women that were hanging around outside his house. He thought they weren't pure enough. I read that recently somewhere. Apparently it was that he saw women selling sex and was so outraged by it. Yeah, he made a pure woman. This is a tale about almost delusion and duplicity. So this delusion is that Pygmalion feels that he really created the perfect being. And he's either really deluded because he thinks that this statue has come to life

or something wondrous happens in this statue. turns into a real girl. So he's either mad and he's having sex with the statue or something magical happens and he's having sex with flesh and blood. So if you look at it that way, it's not really an artificial companion story because he believes it truly to be a real woman. That's true. I suppose the similarity, but he was trying to make the perfect. He was, yes. So it was again, it's a story about control and a story about perfection and what you're trying to look for in a partner and manufacturing that partner. So that's definitely an element of it. And of course that echoes right down the years because there've been so many,

so many narratives based on that pygmillian story. Yeah, they have. Like anything where like you've got the woman who needs to undergo some kind of massive makeover to become like everything from Greece and my fair lady, that was the one that I was thinking of where she's made into this perfect woman. So we've got all these stories and there are actually littered all throughout history of men in particular attempting to make. the perfect partner. Women, they do crop up, but do they crop up in it's kind of more like,

I really loved him and now he's dead, so I'm going to make a dolly of him? It tends to be, yeah, that tragic love story as opposed to the perfect partner who will be there for my every whim. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that poor Laudamaya was, you know, I miss my husband so much, I will make a replica of him. And there's a Black Mirror episode called Be Right Back, where the grieving widow decides to engage with this service that will reconstruct her husband's personality through all the social media posts. And then she gets the chance to make an android version of him

who kind of looks exactly like him, behaves like him, but not quite like him. So he's too agreeable. He doesn't contest her in the way that a real partner would, but she wants him back so desperately because she misses him so much. So I've often thought that. It's like you'd need to work in a few bugs to this kind of stuff if you could create the perfect person robot, because like ultimate compliance and looking amazing and perfect

and being there would be a great novelty for a bit, but that would get boring pretty quick, wouldn't it? It would, I think. But you could do that. It's not impossible to be able to put in that level of... Building a few arguments software. Yeah, absolutely. That could be done.

It definitely could be done. And in fact, when that Black Mirror episode aired, which was quite a while ago now, I think it was like 2014, something like that. One of the things that struck me watching it was if you were taking all those social media data, you'd also get a lot of that friction if you archive, you know, that tension or those kind of little quirks. For example, if you archived people's WhatsApp messages and then went through those and reconstructed people like that. Imagine the rise you'd have as well.

That is an insane theological point. It's like what kind of you would they reconstruct if they went through your social media? Exactly. And that's the really interesting thing about social media is that we present so many different facets of our personalities through all these different. avenues. Twitter me is probably different from Instagram me, for example. Instagram me posts nice pictures of nice things. Twitter me slags off the world and gets angry about things. Facebook me posts a name, you know, group messages about while swimming. So yeah, it's this different individual personalities for different facets. Sex dolls have a very long history as well. So shagging statues

trying to like recreate perfect models of people has a weirdly longer history. It seems that's something that we've been very interested in. So, like, when you think of a sex doll, I guess you think of the kind of the inflatable ones beloved of stagdos, the world, over. They are definitely nicer than that. And I say that as someone. They are much nicer.

That is proper basic stuff. Yeah. Like, you know, we need to upgrade guys. But going back, like, what's the evidence for people creating sex dolls as sex aides? It's really hard to pin it down. So there was, I think it was Bo Ruberg. They wrote a book recently about sex dolls at sea.

where they said essentially that the evidence is not there. People were always saying, oh, these sealers were making bundles of clothes and having sex with them. Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah, I have as well. But given that we have these stories for a long time, I think, who knows? Certainly the sex doll itself emerged when the technology was capable of creating the more and more life-like forms.

I mean, it's quite a niche thing, but it's not that niche. But it's incredibly taboo. And people don't, they really fear being judged if they, are doll owners, which is, it just, you know, seems quite unfair. So when I went into to study the sex robots and was doing my research, I admit that I was completely had bought into the, the trope that people who own sex dolls must be some kind of lonely individuals who can't form real world relationships. And that's not true at all. That was me being incredibly judgmental and very little evidence. And I was pleased to be proven wrong. And really, it's just, it's very much

a community, almost like a hobby that people have, that, you know, in the same way that's Yeah, we all have things that we do in our lives and it's part of our lives, but it doesn't mean it impacts our everyday relationships with others. When I wrote Curious History, I did a chapter on sex dolls, and at the time, and I wrote it in 2019, there was very little research out there about the demographics of people that use sex dolls. Has that changed in the interim? Yeah, there has been.

And fortunately, a lot of the time, the research is fairly respectful of that community. And I wouldn't dream of speaking for them, but I really appreciate the help that they've given me in trying to understand that context in terms of sex robots. But yes, it tends to be predominantly straight men and they tend to be reasonably well off because they need to be to be able to afford these things, which run upwards off, you know, $3,000 for a basic doll. And also the terminology is interesting too. So we do refer to them, we being the media and us and everyone discussing it called sex dolls. the people I've spoken to don't really like that term. And dolls is fine, synthetic partners, things like that. But the one thing that people kept emphasizing to me was that it's not just about sex.

So people own these dolls for a number of reasons. Some because it is a sex thing. And they might even have a fetish to do with the dolls. But some because they want to have this relationship, have this projected relationship with their doll or dolls. And that's something that they get a lot out of. For others, it's about styling them, posing them and photographing them or just collecting them, because they are really beautifully crafted. And when I went to see the workshop, it's a real doll, I kind of went with an expectation that, as a feminist, I'd be horrified at the objectification of the women.

And then I was really struck with this cognitive dissonance because these things are so well crafted and beautiful. They really are finely made, and the detail is amazing. So we're not talking about the blow-up inflatable doll here, O.E. Tell me about these dolls that we're talking about here. What's the sort of the really premium doll? The really premium ones. I'd say that the real doll are probably one of the leading companies in that. And they will build a doll to your specification within a range.

So you can choose the attributes from almost a menu in ways. And these are sort of life-sized silicon dolls that when you see them up close, of course you're not going to think that they're real. But when you see them from a distance away and they're sitting there, or in a picture, you do start to think, wow, that's really incredibly lifelike. But when you get really close, you're walking around the workshop.

And I remember seeing the foot of one of these, and it had tiny creases in the skin and little wrinkles in the toes. And it was, and little freckles painted on. And it was just really fine detail that surprised me. And actually, I thought it was quite beautiful in a way. What would these set you back?

What's the top of the range doll? I'm not sure what the price is at the moment. I think it was around, you know, sort of three to five thousand dollars upwards. for dolls. I mean, like you can spend a lot of money on one of these things if you're going for high-end things. There are, of course, cheaper versions. They're not as well crafted. They're not as artisan as that, though I think they do some really good versions too. But yeah, so there's a wide range of different types of things. I'll be back with Kate after this short break.

Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment. And would man have ever got to the moon without the bra? You can expect answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from History Hit, Patented History of Inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians, and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to patented history of inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. I've got to ask, like, what happens with the vulva?

Like, is that detach both it and take it out and wash it? Yeah, yeah, it is. I think dragging the whole doll over to the sink. Like what's... No, you can take it out. So the dolls themselves are really heavy, and they can't stand up on their own. So you can pose them, and when you touch them, it feels like someone's skin as it's just had moisturiser on it.

Really? But colder, but you can warm them with, you know, a blanket or a hot water bottle. to get it up to the room temperature. But yeah. Okay. It sounds really weird, doesn't it? Do you know, it's kind of like the whole thing that unpins this

is that what Freud would call, like, you know, well, he's got enough of his own going on, but he called it like uncanny, didn't it? And it is that kind of feeling that for just some reason, like dolls, robots, artificial humans, they just give us the ick.

And I feel really sorry for, you know, the guys that are just having fun with their dolls. And, but it is kind of all caught up with this kind of like, oh, gross, you could like warm the, vagina rub before you take it to the sink and rinse it out. I think a lot of the taboo does stem from this uncanny. Well, I mean, it's also stems from sex taboos and social attitudes of sex. But I think that there is to be around the fact that these are uncanny. And in robotics, that's a term that's

used widely for machines that are humanoid. Oh, is it? We should probably explain what Freud meant by that. What does he mean by uncanny? So this was the idea that something is, it seems real, it seems alive, but it's not alive. And no one really knows why we react in this way, why we get the ick about it. But it's possible it comes from us a fear of death. So we see something that looks alive, but isn't. So it's redolence of death or a corpse. And that might be a signal to our brains that this is not right, that this is, this is scaring us. And in robotics, it's known as the Uncanny Valley effect. The idea that you create something that's very lifelike, but the minute it starts to portray any semblance of life, if it starts moving, if it starts talking.

And then, of course, you get freaked out because it's not really real. Yeah. And it's an effect that's observable in computer generated imagery as well. So when Polar Express, the film came out years ago, everyone was quite freaked out because these were computer generated characters who weren't quite right. And our brain goes, oh, that's not right. Yes. Of course, in computer graphics now, we've got so good at it that that uncanny valley is

nearly crossed. We don't really, we can't really tell anymore in a film where the CGI is. But in robotics, unfortunately, we're a very long way away from that. And I'm actually think we probably shouldn't bother because it's so, so complex to create a lifelike robot. And like, would you want to do it? Like, would you want a robot that was indistinguishable from a human being? That's the other question, yeah. That's the other one, in it? I think everyone's experienced that uncanny thing. Like, any time, like, you see a robot head when you're scrolling through Twitter doing something terrified. Like, like, everyone has that kind of, oh, oh, it's weird, it's weird. That's the uncanny. And it's anything that something like is familiar, but then it's not familiar. Like, another example would be

like, you know, scary kids in horror movies, like, like a nice, see? It's a very particular type of fear. Like, when you've got a kid in there that, like, you know, big, like, death eyes and they're singing horrible nursery rhymes. Oh, my God. Yes. Even worse, that they're wearing a mask and, and anything like that, that kind of gives you the shivers, and dolls, the hebi-jeebies, and dolls definitely do that. So the idea that you'd get, I mean, ultimately, like, what's the difference really between a vibrator and a doll apart from price? But one kind of freaks you the fuck out and the other one is, you know, pretty culturally accepted. Yeah, so there's something elemental there.

There's something there about the body and the embodiedness of the robot compared to the discreteness of some replica genitals. So an artificial vagina, like a flashlight, people go, okay, it's a sex. toy, put that fleshlight in a life-sized human doll and people get really freaked out. That's true. And I think also, like, if you were to make like a false vulva that was insanely realistic, that would also be terrifying. In the same way that like, I don't like dildos that look insanely real. It's like why, I don't want one that actually looks like a severed dick. Give me one with rainbows and glitter. Yeah. Now, that's a really interesting one because that has changed dramatically over the past 20, 25 years.

And it's come out of obscenity laws in Japan, apparently. No way. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. So when the whole Sex and the City rabbit vibrator episode opened everyone's minds the idea that you could have a vibrator that was essentially an optimized penis. A penis upgraded. Yeah. It's kind of abstracted.

And it turns out that in Japan, there were laws around creating images, replicas of genitals that was considered obscene. And to get around this, the manufacturers were creating abstract. versions and coloured versions and fun-looking versions. Oh. And then, of course, people went, oh, actually, that's not just a way around in the Sendi Law. That's quite a nice design thing. So we moved from this schumorphic design phase where function was the most important thing to something where now we have these sex tech companies creating beautiful,

absolutely ornamental almost sex toys and sex tech, yeah, that are favoured form of a function. I mean, they have both. They still function perfectly well. but they've become something more. They've become pieces of art. It's a kind of a shame that they have to spend so much their lifespan in the dark, really. Well, I mean, in my office in work, I have them all out in the shelves. So I kept getting sent more and more sex toys because I ran some sex tech hackathons

where we were trying to invent new forms of sex tech. And all is wonderful because every week another box would arrive and in work and the office would say, hey, there's another box here, what's in it? We'd open up and go, ooh, where does that go? That's really interesting. Wow. It was really fun. The human imagination knows no limit when it comes to inventing stuff.

I know. I used to say, send me two, one for, you know, personal collection. One for my office shelf. The worst people are going, where did that one that we got on Tuesday? Was that gone, Kate? You're sure you had twice the amount. No. So these are like the super high-tech sex dolls,

the ones that you can warm the skin up and put their vulvas in the dishwasher and that kind of thing. What is the leap from that to a sex robot? And where are we with the tech? It's not that big a leap right now. Right. Okay. So the, and again, it's real doll. I'm not just sort of, this is not an advertisement for real doll. It's just they happen to be the ones that are very close to making these things

at commercially, you know, commercially viable reality. So they were sort of leading the field for many years. And they took one of their sex dolls and they built an animatronic head for the doll. For her, because I keep gendering it when I talk about her, but her name is Harmony. and she has an animatronic head she can smile, blink, tilt her head at angles and she has an AI personality I'm getting the ick already

oh that right, oh you can interact with her and she will talk to you and she will remember things about you and she will grow her knowledge over time and she speaks in the most disconcerting soft Scottish accent Wow it's really straight

she looks like a very Barbie-esque figure a Californian blonde Pamela Anderson type shape and then she talks with this very soft Scottish accent they've gone for a Scottish brogue yeah apparently that was

they tested different voices and that was the one that appealed most of the manufacturing how interesting so what what can Harmony do she can swivel her head and she can go

or eat we laddie laddie dialogue right you choose it but you got under your kilt sunshine so she can do that what else

can she do anything else not quite I think they're working on a on a vagina warming and vibrating or moving. That would be a brave test subject, wouldn't it? Well, they have people who test harmony, yes, they have.

There is a man called Brick Dollbanger and he... Called what, sorry? Brick Dollbanger. Right, okay, okay. And he tests Harmony and gives feedback. Yeah. And is the feedback good? Yeah, it seems to be, yeah.

So this interesting thing about the harmony, I mean, this has been in prototype for years and only now I think are they actually building and shipping. But the AI personality aspect, you can buy that as a standalone app. So you can buy the Harmony girlfriend experience, the personalised app. Only available on Android. So fittingly. How is she different from Siri? She's a lot dirtier than Siri.

Yeah. Well, Siri is really just a glorified voice search engine, whereas Harmony will engage in Real Doll X, as it's called, will engage in conversation with you. And there are other types of apps. that out there. And if anyone's used, there's one called Replica. And Replica also does this kind of girlfriend thing. Will interact with you then pipe when you're not interacting with them enough and get stroppy with you if you're not paying enough attention. And do make these really passive aggressive comments. It's not what you said. It's just the way you said it. Exactly.

So for about 20 quid, you can buy the Harmony app and get nagged from your phone. My God. I mean, one of the things I think is really interesting to come out of this is, as you just said, sex robots at the moment are at the point where Harmony can swivel ahead and deliver some dirty talk and some Dulcet Scottish tones. Like, we're not at the point yet where it's safe for a robot to give you a hand job or meet your mother, right? The hand job bit, there was a robot being developed called Samantha by Circus Santos in Barcelona and he was trying to do that with the hands. But he didn't build the robot itself. He built the AI for it and was actually a really interesting piece of work because he wanted to build a reciprocal relationship. So the nicer you wear to Samantha, the more likely

she was to be up for it. Yeah. And it was actually a really interesting vision and a much more equitable vision, I think. But he got really negative media coverage because he took the Samantha robot to a trade show on an exhibition floor and told people that they could touch the doll. And people, of course, when they're being told, you have permission to touch this, touched a bit too much. there was damage and the newspapers were reporting this as people molesting Adol, which he was really indignant to bite. He said that's not molestation. There was no sexual intention.

They were just handling something they'd been told they could handle. So he just quit after that. He said, I can't take any coverage anymore. Yeah. One of the things that's kind of kicking off about this, even though the technology, it's there, but it's still very much in development-ish stages, is that we're already having big ethical debates around this.

And there's already like a bit of, big furious pushback. And it's probably not just because of the ick, although that, I definitely think that underpins quite a lot of it. But there have been a lot of concerns from some feminist groups about what this means and what this, and that it's disgusting and it's terrible. And this is like the ultimate objectification of women. It's like Steppford wives come true, blah, blah, blah. What do you think? Are there moral implications for this? Do you think that's just media sensationalised? A lot of it is media sensationalism. However, I do, I share some of of those concerns. I share the objectification concern because I don't think that perpetuating

body images that are damaging to women is a good thing. And we have enough of that going on already without adding to it in another sphere. That said, the actual act of people having sex with something that is not real, there's no harm there. And a lot of the arguments have been made, oh, if they treat these, you know, stand in and substitute women badly, then they're going to treat real women badly. Well, for starters, every single person I've spoken to is so respectful of their dolls. And not just because they're paying, you know, thousands of pounds for them, but they are genuinely cherish and care about these dolls. And when I broached that subject with some doll owners about what about people being abusive towards the dolls, they said, oh, there's one

or two people who might be like that, but they're not a welcome part of our community. So I think you have outliers in anything like that. And also, this whole, they won't know how to act in real life saying, this does not hold for me at all in any form of robotics. No, I don't think that's true. Well, I mean, look at, so we always have the old argument around computer games. Does it cause violence? Answer, no, basically. There's been years of work on that and no conclusive answers and actually quite a lot to indicate that it doesn't cause violence. But also fantasies. We walk around with the most deprived fantasies in our head. Well, at least I do. But the most deprived fantasies in our heads. We never act them out in a way that is harmful to anyone. Right. They sort of they kind of stay there. Or you find someone who will share a little bit of that to poverty and you keep it between yourselves. But it doesn't, you know, we know how to behave in different contexts. It doesn't translate that if we act out of fantasy, that we're going to act it out in real life. There are just a few people perhaps who would do that and they've got problems. That's, that's in any facet of life, you have that. That's so true. We do not run

around acting like we do in the bedroom. That's, you just don't. Like, you have sexual fantasies and, you know, I've never once treated a man like a vibrator in tried to put batteries in him, for example. The mantle picture there is great. How do I turn it off? I'm being facetious, but I think that that's a really strong point. It's just because something turns somebody on. It does not mean that they're no longer a responsible citizen.

Something else that I've heard, and this is a really complex one, is the issue of consent. I have heard people saying, these dolls can't consent. You are, by definition, having sex with this completely passive, female form that can't consent. And that kind of, that gets very head screwy because you kind of like, but it's, it doesn't need to because it's not real because there I don't really see that much difference from a sex toy because we don't ask for consent for sex toys. But we are still probably going

through similar thought processes when we engage with them because we're probably fantasising or, you know, thinking about it as if it is, well, maybe because maybe as if it is real or maybe it's just because it's a nice sensation. We never consider that. It's completely different if there's a person there. You know, that's... It's again, it's that uncanny thing again, isn't it? It's because it looks like a real body.

Yeah, which is why actually, I say, move away from the humanoid sex robot thing, because they're really difficult to make. They're really expensive to make. The storage of them is really difficult because where do you keep your sex robot in a small flat? That's what I want to know. I mean, you need a special sex robot cupboard really.

Of course. Or you have a rowing all the time or him. Oh, do they make them for women? Do they make men sex robots for women? Well, there are sex robots meal versions that they sell to gay men and straight women. It's really hard to get a woman to talk about owning a sex store. And have you found anyone? Really hard.

It's really hard, she said. Be really disappointed after two ground and it's not. So have you found any women who would talk about their experiences with them? this? I haven't, but there was a recent article by Hallie Lieberman who wrote the book Buzz, and she did an article recently on it and found women to talk to her about it, and it's really interesting. Okay. I spoke to her a couple months ago, and she did actually mention that, and I think she said that they weren't an overwhelming success. No, so I think, again, it was similar, actually, to the way that the men are behaving with them, in that there's a kind of a relationship or a

projected relationship aspect to it. So yeah, but it's really, if you know, it's taboo enough for men, it's, it's, you know, multibly tabo. Super taboo. Super taboo for women. I just see this as being something that like, you know, it was like a fad, like, like the running machine or the weights and that your sex doll would just, would just end up, yeah, we just have washing hanging off it, but.

Just standing there with, you know, the t-shirt draped off his arm. Like, what, yeah, and where would you keep it? Right, okay, so they are out there then. what do you think is the future for these things? Because there's this fear that we're going to be unleashed this nymphomaniac sex bot army like Austin Powers. What do you think? Well, what does that tell you about male ideas of control?

I mean, really, that you're going to unleash these women and who are untamable and he'll break their programming and rise up against the patriarchy. I say bring it. Bring it. Well, no. So in reality, I don't think that sex robots is going to be anything more than a niche thing in their physical form

because of all these reasons. However, the AI side of it, with the virtual experience, yes, I can absolutely see that being much more commonplace. Of course, virtual sex. So either in VR, augmented reality, or just with online interactions with an AI, with a chatbot and a dirty talking chatbot. And there is definitely, that is a scope. And we, so I ran two hackathons, one in 2016 and then again in 2017, sex tech hack and then sex tech hack the second coming. Oh nice. And we we brought together people from all walks of life, so not just techies, but psychologists, artists, musicians, sex toy industry experts. And we got people into groups and they prototyped new forms of sex tech

and sexual experiences. And it was absolutely fascinating. It was really, really interesting. And it was anything from in the first year a sexual cryptocurrency. So you had to rub a real world leather wallets to generate a sexual crypto coin. And the idea was that you could love sex or love money, but you couldn't have both. Wow. So there was other things like people doing filters to get around porn blocks. There were people creating vibrators that would be driven by music or by stock market fluctuations. I like that one. No way. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck the system. That was their so title. And then the two that got prizes, which were my favourite,

the overall winner was a soft robotics one where they made almost like tentacles out of soft rubber that you could put on your arms or on your legs or on your genitals, wherever you wanted. And when you squeezed a controller, it pumped air into the tentacles and made them curl around your body. It was really, really interesting. It was really nice. And then the other one was a group that said, you know, you can tell very easily. when someone has aroused when they have a penis because it's very visible, but you can't tell arousal visually from a vagina.

So they got a vaginal egg and they covered it in moisture sensors. And when the moisture sensors were triggered, it opened up a giant paper fan, like an external giant paper fan, to signal, to signal arisen. And, you know, as an art concept, that's really wonderful. But you could do things with prosthetics with that as well. I mean, there's all sorts of really interesting places that could go. Wow. It was really exciting and really interesting. And then the following year,

they were gripped at one, they made what I called a sensuous shawl and what they called a sex blanket. And it was a shawl with sensors attached to it. So you placed the shawl on your body with these sensors on your skin. And then if you were in a virtual or an augmented reality environment and say you saw rose petals falling from the ceiling, well, that would trigger the sensors on your skin. So you'd think that you were feeling those rose petals. So you could control these multi-modal, multi-sensorial experiences. And I think that's so promising. I think that that would be where the sex robots for women would go is if you could create something where you can kind of transport yourself into some film, TV series,

whatever it is, and live out your fantasy with that character. Like Mr. Darcy, for example, coming out of the lake, if, like, you could go and... If you could, like, pick... Yeah, drops of water on your skin and tentacles and your genitals. And all of those, I think that that would be. That was in that lick. So I don't think that future of sex tech is scary after talking to you. It's not scary.

And I should say that in all of these things, when people say, oh, you can never love something that can't love you back, can I just say that humans have been doing that for years, years and years? And we also, not just with other humans, but we also build parasocial relationships with characters. like you say, characters and films and books all the time. But you're right, we do form these odd erotic attachments to sometimes things that aren't even real. At least a sex robot is real.

But, you know, we're having fantasies about a film character that's completely fictional. Exactly. And it's, you know, the fanfic world is absolutely testament to that. And I love it. It's wonderful. People have created whole universes, whole alternative canons are about the characters that they love. I think that's a beautiful thing. Isn't that wild that human beings do that? I mean, we've got to be the only creature on the entire planet that has this kind of in-depth fantasy life.

And I think the really lovely thing is that it's not going to replace human-human relationships. This is just not going to happen. Look at how we are just programmed in our DNA to seek out other humans. So I'm not afraid that we're somehow going to get replaced by machines. I just don't think that will happen at all. You heard it here first, folks. I agree. You go and enjoy your sex.

toys and machinery and you have fun with that. But Kate, if people want to find out more about you and your work, and they should, because it's fascinating, where can they look you up? Well, they can, first of all, they can read my book. Read the book. Read my book. It's called Turned On Science, Sex, and Robots, and it goes into all of this stuff. You'll find me on Twitter all the time at Dr. Kate Devlin or Dr. Kate Devon.com for more. Fantastic. Thank you so much. You have been so much fun to talk to you this morning. Likewise. I do hope that you've enjoyed this episode as much I did with Kate. If you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again between the sheets, the history of

sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hits. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.