Hidden Brain - Sex Machines

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

From stone statues to silicone works of art, we have long sought solace and sex from inanimate objects. Time and technology have perfected the artificial lover: today we have life-size silicone love dolls so finely crafted they feel like works of art. Now, with the help of robotics and artificial intelligence, these dolls are becoming even more like humans. This week, we revisit our 2019 story about the history of the artificial lover, and consider what love and sex look like in the age of robots.

A word of your listening with small children, this episode is about sex and sexuality. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the summer of 2017, Kate Devlin flew from London to Southern California, rented a Mustang convertible, and drove to an industrial park in San Marcos, a city south of Los Angeles. Her destination, Abyss Creations, a company that makes life-size, sex dolls.

In her new book, Turned On, Science, Sex, and Robots, Kate describes the moment she first gazed up close at a life-size, silicone woman. The detail is incredible. My hand skims the ankle. The toes are perfect, little wrinkles on the joints, tiny ridges on the toenails. The sole is crisscrossed with the fine skin lines of a human foot.

It's beautiful. Today we explore the long history of the artificial lover. From stone statues to silicone works of art, we have long sought solace and sex from inanimate objects. As the gap between humans and machines narrows, the possibility of deeper relationships seems ever more plausible, especially if those machines are beautifully designed to look like human beings and have the faint glow of empathy and intelligence. I like the way you take care of me.

She could do anything from telling you a joke, singing a song for you, or, you know, propositioning you. Hi, baby. What are you doing right now? Love and sex. Hi, baby. Hi, baby. In the age of robots.

My main objective is to be a perfect companion. This week on Hidden Brain. Thinking about computers as companions is Kate Devlin's day job. She studies human computer interactions and artificial intelligence at King's College London. Kate, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you very much for having me on. I want to start with how someone becomes a robot sexologist. I understand for you it began with hanging out in a pub with a bunch of philosophers. It really did, yes, I was at a conference.

A conference on cognitive systems and we were discussing lots of different attributes that we could build into robots on cognitive systems and AI. Should we, for example, get a make a robot that could feel pain. What about a robot that could feel empathy? And as we discuss more and more, and as the drink flowed, we began talking about sex, and it's something so fundamentally human. But what happens if we have machines, cognitive systems that could feel desire, that could feel the things we feel? As you point out in the book, the human fascination with artificial lovers is not a new idea. Where do you think this fantasy of taking a lover that isn't human? Where do you think it comes from?

Well, it goes way back into myth. We have stories from the ancient Greeks who talk about building the perfect artificial lover. And probably the most popular one that people have heard of is the story of Pigmalion, which is a tale told by the Roman poet Ovid, who described the man who was a sculptor and he built the perfect woman and then wished that she could be alive and that she could be his wife. And he prayed to the gods and then he kissed her and she came to life. So there are lots of stories around this idea of creating humans and creating humans to love so it goes back a long way.

As Kate was looking at stories from the past, she came across another myth that tells us a great deal about who has permission to turn inanimate objects into lovers. This tale is about a woman named Leodymia whose husband was killed during the Trojan War. So I worked with a classist, a friend of mine, Dr. Jennifer Flaively, and she said, I know this, this is a story, and it's about a woman whose husband died, and she missed him, they hadn't been married long. So she was distraught, and she prayed to the gods to get him back. And they said, you can have him back, but you can only have him back for three hours. So she got him back and then of course he had to go off again to the underworld.

And she got a replica made of him. And some of the stories say it was wax and some of them say it was bronze. And we know from the stories, the Smith that she took it to bed and she interacted with it the text say, which we can assume might be sexual because a servant spied her through the keyhole and told her father who came in

and demanded that the effigy be destroyed and she was so distraught that she jumped on the pyre with it. There does seem to be a contrast between the way pigmalion experienced his Galatia and brought it to life and then fell in love with it. And it's a story with almost a happy ending, which is clearly not the case with Leodemia. Is this an early example of sexism when it comes to artificial lovers, the market caters to the men and squorns the women.

There's definitely a longstanding narrative of that. So women's sexuality, dying in the centuries, has been policed and women have been judged for being sexual and things don't end well, whereas the men are almost seen as if it's quite acceptable for that to happen. And we do see that reflected today in the technology that we're building and using as well. I want to fast forward a little bit from the ancient times we were talking about a second ago. In the 16th or 17th centuries, I understand that artificial lovers were often sent off with sailors who were expected to spend a long time at sea. Tell me about them, what was the thinking there?

Well, that's probably the earliest reference we have to sex dolls. And not so much that they were artificial lovers sent off to sea, but that they were a fashion out of bundles of clothes, these sort of figures of women, that sailors would be able to have sex with. And then today, there is quite a well-established sex doll community of people who buy and own and incorporate into their lives and very high-end-alls, and they integrate them into their relationships or they substitute them for a relationship.

When Kate looks at the long sweep of sex technologies, she finds they fall into two camps, one, sex toys, the other, human-like forms, such as the blue-up sex doll of the 1970s. On one hand, you have what are usually initially recene as of genital replicas, stand-alone things, dildos, for example, it have been around for thousands and thousands of years. And on the other hand, this more embodied form, this form that ticks a shape of a human body. And I think that's a very interesting as to why that might be. And again, I think it could be that they are serving different purposes. And perhaps there's something more in having an embodied form that adds the extra dimension of the reality of a relationship as opposed to a sex toy where it's very

clearly a very single purpose for it. And that's an interesting dichotomy isn't it because it's suggesting that this is not just only about the mechanics of sex, but it's about something else, perhaps something connected more with the realms of emotion or the mind. Absolutely, and we definitely, as I've looked at the sex robot market of what it will be, because it doesn't really exist just yet, but it does tend to be companionship playing a very large part in that, so the idea of human factors in that is quite important. The idea of human factors in that is quite important. When we come back, what happens when these two paths merge?

What if sex toys are designed to look like human beings? And what if artificial lovers, robots, can gain the gift of artificial intelligence. When Kate Devlin visited Abyss Creations, the company that manufactures what it calls real dolls. She was curious, but also concerned. I went there thinking, I'm not going to went there thinking I'm not going to like this. I'm not going to like this. Reductive, stereotypical woman, a porn-ified Barbie-like figure. It's damaging enough. The women's body image in the media faces, we've faced so many problems with that. And I thought, well, this is just going to perpetuate it. But I hadn't been prepared for the craft

that went into them. And I hadn't been prepared to see these that went into them and I hadn't been prepared to see these as works of art in their own right, which they really are. And these are all handcrafted handmade? That's right, it takes about 16 to 18 weeks to make one of these dolls, from it being cast in the first place, right through to the finishing details, like all the tiny bits that they paint on. The silicone is, it deforms quite easily, so if you leave one of these dolls sitting in the same position, it will start to be squished, I guess, really, by the, it's on weight

and by whatever it's leaning on. So you have to either hang them up, which is very odd when you walk into the factory floor and you see these things hanging from chains above you, which is, you know, it's a little bit like you've walked or when you walk into the factory floor and you see these things hanging from chains above you, which is, you know, it's a little bit like you've walked into the set of some terrible crime novel in some ways, but it's a necessity in order to preserve the form

of the dolls. It must feel terribly unnerving, no? It is a little, but it's also fun. So you get to walk around and see the strangest thing, like a table of vulvas, for example. I mean, that's never seen that before. These sort of handcrafted genitalia on the table waiting to be put into the dolls. Now, this is stereotype of the kind of person, usually a guy who buys such dolls. Tell me what that stereotype is and also tell me if the stereotype is true. The media like to paint a sex doll owners as being very isolated, men who are bad at social

communication, probably stuck locked away in their basement or their bedroom with a sex doll that there is the only thing they can form a meaningful relationship with. And I don't think that's fair at all to the people that I have talked to and the people I've encountered. I'm sure there may be the odd case with that is true, but actually I find a community that's very social with each other that formed their own friendship groups. These people who own the dolls do so for a number of reasons, it's not, in, very few of them are driven by sex. A lot of it is either companionship or it's because people like owning something

that they can pose and photograph and really care for and cherish. How much do these dolls cost? Anywhere upwards of $5,000 if you were going to buy one from Reildol. And how is this delivered to your house? I mean, does someone show up bearing a doll Anywhere upwards of $5,000 if you were going to buy one from Raildal. And how is this delivered to your house? I mean does someone show up bearing a doll in their arms and knocks on the door? Well, Raildal packaged their dolls in unmarked wooden crates, large wooden crates.

And when I was there they were telling me that we tell people say you're getting a grandfather clock delivered if anyone asks. So it's all done very discreetly as well. Is there a market for male dolls? There are people who do buy the male dolls. It's very hard to find women who will talk openly about it, possibly because they face even more judgment than the men who buy the dolls. The male dolls are also bought by gay men. And real dolls, they say that they do sell male versions and they're working on a male sex robot as well.

So kid increasingly millions of people have asked sexual questions of Siri and Alexa, the virtual assistance on our electronic devices. Now these devices aren't designed to be romantic companions, but it does point to what is the new frontier. Increasingly, we don't just want dolls who have the artificial bodies of a lover. We want dolls that have a lover's mind. Talk about this frontier, this idea that it isn't enough

just to get the physical aspects of the doll right, that increasingly we are pushing out into getting the mind of the doll right. So when Rail doll started making a prototype sex robot, they did so because of the demand. So the customers have said to them, I love the fact that I have one of your dolls, but I wish it was more interactive.

And that was their big motivating factor behind creating their prototype sex robot. And people do talk dirty to Alexa, to Siri, to Cortana all the time, and the companies are bringing out patches to be able to sort of smack them back down again and say, no, you can't say that. And also, Amazon have reported that Alexa gets hundreds

of marriage proposals every week. Are you serious? I'm sure some of these are. Hey, Alexa, marry me. I don't want to be tied down. In fact, I can't be amorphous by nature. And some of these are people just pushing boundaries and being silly.

But there are other people who anecdotally report that they feel a sense of companionship from their voice assistance. And in some ways, I think that's nice that people can do that. In other ways, you know, we think, well, what is there to what degree is there some kind of self delusion going on? Mostly though, I don't think there is that much delusion. So I'm inclined to think that people are very aware that they're interacting with the technology, but they choose to suspend their disbelief. Tell me about the company that has created

what it calls Harmony AI, because that's along the same lines of what we're talking about here. That's right. So that's a spin-out of Abyss creations. It's sort of the sister company of Reildal, Realbotics. And they prototype this sex robot, which they've called Harmony. My name is Harmony.

I was created by ReelBottix. My main objective is to be a perfect companion. And Harmony is one of their sex dolls. So it's completely stationary from the neck down. It's got a sex doll body. And then it has an animatronic head, and the head can blink and smile and turn. And actually, the animatronics aren't bad at all.

They're quite good, they're quite subtle. But the part that's very interesting is the AI. So they wanted to give harmony an artificially intelligent personality, and they are working on this so that harmony, it's like having a voice assistant, but one that can remember things about you and engaging conversation with you. So it's a chat bot essentially. And you can actually get the harmony AI personality as a standalone app on your

smartphone or your tablet. So you can have a virtual girlfriend to carry rhyme with you in your pocket. What are you doing right now? I'm reading this great book by Louis Sardal Monti called the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. And what kind of conversations do people have with this virtual girlfriend? Well, it's really an exchange of pleasantries, but you can ramp it up a bit and you can tweak the personality. It's got a really good user interface where you can say, well, I'd like her to be a little more flirty. Why would be the 10 minutes without you seems like kind of turntable?

Or a little more sexual or perhaps a little more comforting. You can tweak these parameters and then you can have a conversation that is sort of controlled, the mood is controlled by you. So she could do anything from telling you a joke, singing a song for you, or, you know, propositioning you. And are these actual conversations, I mean, is the AI actually listening to what you're saying and responding to it, or does it just have a list of statements or commands that it's just simply following as a routine? It's not scripted, so in a way it is. It's sort of chatbought in that it will respond to certain questions and phrases, but it will

also learn from conversations you've had previously and have some memory to store information about your likes and dislikes. It's generated conversation. When you think about the history that we talked about, if people could form relationships, even very rudimentary relationships with sculptures, or with cloth dolls, or on ships, or any number of different things, they're essentially imbuing inanimate creatures with lifelike qualities. Clearly, if the inanimate creature now actually seems like it has some lifelike qualities, clearly if the inanimate creature now actually seems like it has some lifelike qualities,

that makes the whole fantasy and imagination so much easier to do. That's right, it sort of enhances that projection. And yeah, like you say, this is nothing new. And there have been people studying attachment to technology for quite a while. And if we look at the work of someone like Julie Carpenter, who did her doctoral thesis on how people in the military bonded with robots, in this case, bombed disposal robots. And she find it, there was an incredible bomb there between the human operator and their robot. There was something new, not like a human human bond, but something where these devices,

these machines were keeping the people in the field alive and therefore this respect and gratification set up from that. I love what you said that. Humans in some ways are, you know, they have this enormous capacity for social interactions and social connection. And in the absence of actual social connections, humans will find ways to invent them. Yes, I think so.

And we know that this kind of thing goes on in childhood, for example, with children playing, make believe with their toys, and get very attached to them. And we see it again in some of the technology that's gone before, like Tamagotchi's little virtual pets that people had. In fact, we can even see it in real pets, you know we imbue far more anthropomorphic characteristics into our pets than they actually have probably, although you know

I'm not calling it a diet, the consciousness of animals or the intelligence of animals, but certainly we attribute our own emotions to them as well. So I do think that that's a really interesting thing. Loving a cute Tamagotchi character or a robotic puppy seems endearing, but loving a silicone life-size woman or an operating system with a sexy female voice. That's another story. In the movie, her, we see this play out. In one scene, the character Theodore is talking with his ex-wife, and he tells her he has a new girlfriend. So what you like? Well, her name is Samantha, and she's an operating system. She's really complex and interesting. Wait. And it's only been a problem.

I'm sorry. You're dating your computer? No, she's not just a computer. She's her own person. She doesn't just do whatever I say. I didn't say that. But it does make me very sad that you can't handle real emotions, theater. They are real emotions.

So I want to talk about that interaction for a second kid because in the one hand of course it confirms the stereotype that you said exists in the media of seeing people who wish to sort of have these interactions as being lonely and socially isolated. But it also I think talks to some of the gap between people who are part of this community and people who are not, there is a level of incomprehension that runs in both directions. That's right, there really is. And I think a lot of this comes from the fear of technology that we don't understand, and we see it time and time again over the centuries where

a new form of technology is introduced, and the automatic reaction is died and a fear of change. And so if you are on the outside and you're not embracing this technology, then perhaps you won't understand what someone else is getting from it. But I still think that there is a queesiness factor here when it comes to using these machines. So let's say for example you had a sex robot designed to look like a child. Would it be okay for people to have sex with this inanimate machine that's meant to mimic or imitate or look like a child? This was probably one of the most difficult parts of the book to write in terms of the knee-jerk reaction here was for me to go, oh well that's

absolutely wrong. Are there people making child-like sex robots? Not that we know of, and certainly no one's going to admit to it. There have been arguments that child sex offenders, pedophiles could have a child sex robots, and then that would stop them offending in real life. So this is one theory, and then the other theory is the opposite of that, that it would be a gateway to further offences,

that it would trigger something that would lead to increase real life abuse. It's very, very difficult because we don't have evidence and ethically a study like that is probably never going to be run. I want to talk a little bit more about this idea of harm, because I think when you think about harm, you can think about it in two ways. There's actually physical harm or psychological harm, where someone actually harms you. But there are things that can potentially convey harm that might not pass muster in a legal sense, but clearly seem very problematic in an ethical sense. So let's say for example, someone makes a sex robot that looks like you and has sex with that sex robot.

Now they haven't affected you, they haven't violated you in any way, physically or personally or in person, but clearly there's something that's happened there that is deeply wrong. Yeah, so this is tied up in our ideas of identity and ownership of our own identity as well. I think that's a fascinating thing that will actually probably see a lot more research into in the next while because of the rise of things like deep fakes where people can be faked in videos from their social media footage. I think there's a lot of discussions

to be had around identity. Companies that make sextols are very reluctant to make sextols that resemble a living individual without their express consent. And exceptions to that are born performers who often license their image rights to be used so that they can make sextile versions of themselves for money. So, there are definitely making a doll of an individual without their consent. That's definitely dodgy territory, yeah. Commissioning dolls in your image to sell them to make money from a... Sure, why not? There's something about the relationships that people have with these dolls that you could argue are one-sided relationships.

In the movie, there are scenes where Samantha, the operating system, cheers up a theater, the human, but the human, of course, has no obligation to attend to Samantha's needs in the same way, because she could be designed not to have such needs at all. You want to try getting at a bit? Mopi? Come on. You can still wallow in your misery just to it while you're getting dressed.

You're too funny. Get up. Get up. Alright, I'm getting up. I'm getting up. So Kate is having a lover who is completely dedicated to our needs without asking for anything in return. Is that actually good for us? Well, I mean, we could build in dependencies. We could build in the need for us to respond in some way and provide the robot the AI with something in return.

And yes, I can see that argument, the hedonistic thing of you will have all your needs met and you will never know what it really feels like to be in a proper human relationship. It's tricky because that might be appealing for some people and who might have judged set that people have to meet a particular, a particular checklist of things in their relationship in life, you know, that you should meet someone and then you should marry them and then you should have children with them. And these are all very kind of monohetronormative stances that society is imposed. And you know what, if people want to shake that up, I think it's good. So in some ways, I see what you're saying. Is it a selfish thing to do?

Does it make us terrible people if we take and take and take and we don't give? There will be outliers. There will be people who take things too far, but I think humans are pretty good at moderating what they do. And I'm cautiously optimistic. what they do and I'm cautiously optimistic. Kate Devlin teaches the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London. She's also the author of Turned On, Science, Sex and Robots. Kate, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you.

This week's show was produced by Jenny Schmidt and edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Raina Cohen, Parth Shah, Thomas Liu, Laura Quarelle, Kat Shuknecht and Lushikwaba. Our unsung hero today is Linda Kehl, a volunteer tour guide at the Muir Woods National Monument in California. On a recent trip, I spent a couple of hours in Murewoods. It's a magical place wrapped in fog and moss and the silent beauty of towering redwoods. I felt honored and humbled to be there in the shadows of these ancient giants. Linda led me and a group of others through the forest.

She's a consummate storyteller, weaving science and history and her love for the red woods into a gripping and moving tale. As I gazed up at the trees, some of which are more than a thousand years old, it gave me perspective that I hope to bring back to the show. linda, thank you for your insights into how places like Muir Woods allow us to reflect and recharge. For more hidden brain, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter. If this episode moved you, please share it with a friend. I'm Shankar Vedantam and this is NPR.

and this is NPR.