Imaginary Worlds - Sexy Robots

Episode Date: January 29, 2015

The desirable robot has been a trope in science fiction for almost a century. American University professor Despina Kakoudaki (author of "Anatomy of a Robot") says watching actors play robots is a wish fulfillment -- imagining what it would be like to not feel emotions or deal with the messiness of the human body. I also talk with playwrights Mariah MacCarthy and Leah Nanako Winkler about their off-Broadway festival, "Sex with Robots," which explores the dark desires behind an impossible fantasy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection. Free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late,

do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. So a couple years ago, I was really into this show called Terminator Sarah Connor Chronicles. And in the show, the Terminator was actually this really attractive young woman, played by Summer Glau, who was sent back in time to protect John Connor when he was a teenager.

Come with me if you want to live. The network knew that she was the big selling point. The ads had her kind of naked, airbrushed torso and head hanging by wires, like she'd just come off an assembly line. If I'm damaged, we should know. Even John Connor had confused feelings about his protector. Right here. Reach down under the breastplate.

There. What does it feel like? Cold. That's good, right? That's good. It's perfect. Summer Glau has become kind of a big crush for a lot of geeky guys like myself because she was in other sci-fi shows like Dollhouse and Firefly. But I realized that I actually found her character really attractive, like the killer

robot from the future. And this is something I would not normally admit to other people and sure as hell not admit on a podcast, but it is a perfect way into the subject. So around this time, I started dating my wife, Serena, and she wanted to play that game where you make a list of celebrities that your partner is theoretically allowed to sleep with. She got the idea from a Friends episode. I figured this is a fantasy. You know, it's not like I'm actually giving her permission to have sex with Jon Hamm or Paul Rudd if she ever ran into them.

So, you know, at first I said, oh, I think I'd like to put Summer Glau on my list. And she said, oh, okay, yeah, she's cute. And I said, you know, actually, to be totally honest, I think I'd rather just put her character, the robot, on the list. And, in fact, there's another robot character from this computer animated series about Green Lantern, this really kind of brilliant, sexy robot named Aya. And Wonder Woman and Batgirl. And Serena was not amused.

Using a robot or an animated character doesn't really work because they never change. They will always look like that. So is that what bothers you, that you feel like I've now created a standard that if you're not um and you're not well it doesn't help really that's weird i mean who can what woman can actually match so like essentially fantasy characters okay that's kind of weird I get it.

But in my defense, the idea of the sort of desirable robot goes way back in science fiction. Here's Despina Kakoudaki, who wrote a book called Anatomy of a Robot. One of the first stories that shows an artificial woman in love with men and men in love with her is a story by Lester Del Rey from 1938 called Helen Oloy. These scientists decide that they want to have a new robotic housekeeper. They make a new model, and then they promptly fall in love with her. And she's described as a dream in synthetics and span metals and things like that. That shows us a little bit of what I think is the main backdrop of the stories,

which is to imagine an idealized, perfect beloved that might actually be less challenging than a real woman might be. Helen O'Loy is a forerunner to The Stepford Wives, Rachel from Blade Runner, even the movie Her, where a guy falls in love with his operating system. But that movie is kind of an outlier, because usually a big selling point of the genre is when the human character explores the body of the android.

It's indestructible. It has replaceable body parts. It's very compartmentalized. It has clarity or simplicity in terms of its purpose. And then it has the kinds of spaces that I am always fascinated by that open up, like you open the skull and you see inside and it has wiring, or you open the chest and you look inside and it has buttons that light up. Very easy kind of anatomies for these robotic figures, as if it is the alternative to the vulnerable, very fleshy, very gooey, very sometimes smelly human body.

And it forgets a little bit just how resilient and indestructible the human body can be. Yes, we don't have replaceable body parts in this easy way, but we have this unbelievable resilience and we have this unbelievable ability to respond to disease, to recuperate, to grow. It's a very interesting thing. I don't know why we need this discourse. But a lot of scientists want to have this discourse. Two professors at Victoria University in New Zealand published a paper where they proposed a club in the year 2050 called the Yum Yum Club, where all the sex workers have been

replaced with robots. And this is their plan to solve the problem of prostitution. And then there's the writer David Levy, who wrote a serious book called Love and Sex with Robots. Although he had a little trouble on Colbert. The most common reason, I think, at the beginning will be that there are millions of people out there in the world who, for one reason or another,

can't establish normal relationships with humans. They're lonely, they're miserable, and robots, when they're sophisticated enough, will be an excellent alternative. Are these people who can't establish relationship with other human beings, are they, by any chance, people who write about love and sex with robots?

No. No? Sex with robots, that's what we're talking about. That's what everybody's talking about on Twitter now, at 680CJOB and on our Facebook page. And this is from a Canadian radio show. The guest is Neil MacArthur, a professor of applied ethics at the University of Manitoba. People always say, well, why is it different from a vibrator? But the fact is, robots are things that we, anything that reminds us of a living being or a human, we connect with them.

We attribute, even if we know better, we start to attribute souls to them and we start to connect with them emotionally. And I think that's where people start to get ethically concerned. This is not just a vibrator. This is not just a toy. This is something that we're going to make a connection with and something that's going to start possibly changing the way we look at relationships and looking at sex. A robot prostitute or soldier can take damage that a human being can't. But Despina says when we buy into this idea, we're lying to ourselves. Very often we treat objects with quite a lot of fascination and we treat objects really well.

We treat people badly. That's a matter of course in culture. Only people can be truly treated as non-people. Objects are treated differently. Putting watermarks on a beautiful wooden table. Oh, you just feel it as if it is a wound. And so there's a way in which when people make these facile descriptions about treating someone like an object, if you think about how we treat objects, yes, OK, we might kick our car if it doesn't start,

but we also love them in a way that is really quite invested. And in many ways, it is always cheaper to abuse people than to invent a machine to do the same labor. But maybe the most interesting take on this subject happened off-Broadway. Honey, what language is it speaking? Like Chinese or some kind of Asian-y kind of? Japanese. On a Saturday night in Hell's Kitchen,

these actors were rehearsing a play about a white couple that buys a Japanese robot. Your flesh looks so real. Leah Nonica Winkler wrote the play. It's called, I'll let her pronounce it. It means important person. Or I wanted to title it that because that's essentially what the robot is there for the couple.

I saw you bite her. I saw you lick her. The play was part of an off-Broadway festival called Sex with Robots. Mine was the only one that kind of went in a way that was like, we hate this robot and we're very unhappy so we're going to kill it. A lot of the pieces were like i i'm my wife died so i'm gonna create a robot or um i'm horny so i'm gonna get this robot sex yeah so this festival was curated by another playwright named mariah mccarthy and she says when she first sent

the email out to a lot of her friends asking if they wanted to write a play about sex with robots they were very excited and she thought that when the plays came back, they'd be really funny. But they were really dark. In fact, after the show, a friend of hers went up to her and said, you know, you could have called this the Sex with Slaves Festival. Like with the woman who creates a robot that will abuse her, or with the man who wants his new robot wife to be as dismissive and cold and that relationship to be as fraught as his relationship with his real wife was there's still a sense of like i have control of this this is is mine. This will do what I say. But Leah doesn't think that's a bad thing. People are sick, you know, like people are fucking sick. And you can do all the things

that you're embarrassed about communicating to an actual human partner on this robot. So a lot of it is about a lack of, you can have a relationship with no shame. Yeah, no shame. You're always accepted. I mean, you know, like I like seeing guys humans, but like if there was a sexual companion guy and I was rich and, or maybe it didn't cost very much and it looked completely human, it had a nice penis and it was good in bed i would not be above buying one if i was lonely i have to say these two really kind of shattered my stereotype of who thinks about sex with robots and they each admitted that they they have a big crush on gigolo joe which is jude law's character

from ai well he's good at super good at sex and super sexy and like nice in that movie too. There was something benevolent about him, something kind of like darkly sexy about him, but he ultimately wants to help and his intentions are good. I'm afraid it will hurt. Once you've had a lover, robot, you'll never want a real man again. But again, reality check, we are nowhere close to making a cyborg that can cross the uncanny valley and pass for a human.

Or really cross the room and pass for a human walking. The robot in Leah's play is based on a real android called Geminoid F, which was created by a very eccentric scientist named Hiroshi Ishiguro. And she's not that much more sophisticated than a Disney World animatronic. Geminoid F is actually teleoperated. Ishiguro himself will go into another room and operate her from a computer. This is crazy, but he wants to transplant his own soul onto the robot. Despina Kakudaki thinks that these robots are just kind of a narcissistic fantasy.

She doesn't understand why they even need gender. The robots in the real world that actually are productive and that do productive labor are usually not anthropomorphic. The robots that we sent to Mars, for example, are working really well and are doing amazing things out there. It's just wonderful to imagine that there is an element of human culture that's in Mars collecting samples from rocks and things like that. It's just magnificent. The robots that are transforming the automotive industry or the biotech industry right now, those are extremely productive robots.

Robots that are imagined in robotics projects in everyday life as needing the human form often are fetishistic or sculptural. They are not producing any labor. They're not actually doing very much except to promote the idea of innovation or the idea of a company doing something futuristic. So they're a lot more symbolic than real. In a way, this whole sci-fi trope is not really

even about robots. It's about how we feel when we watch people play robots. My favorite example for that is someone like Commander Data in Star Trek. Data, you are fully functional, aren't you? Of course, but... How fully? In every way, of course. I am programmed in multiple techniques, a broad variety of pleasuring. You are fully functional, aren't you? Of course, but... How fully? In every way, of course. I am programmed in multiple techniques, a broad variety of pleasuring. Oh, you jewel. That's exactly what I hoped. You have this character who is really quite beloved by audiences,

who is emotionally not able to feel the certain kinds of emotion or certain kinds of pain. So you have situations where somebody says something and all of his colleagues say, but Data, doesn't it hurt your feelings? Don't you feel upset about this? And he says, I am unable to feel that emotion. Now something, so you can say that that shows a type of lack, what a pity he's unable to feel that emotion. But the fact that we keep putting him in situations where he might feel that emotion, but actually, happily, he doesn't, it implies a type of investment in not having to feel that emotion ourselves.

I mean, it's already started, and it's just going to accelerate. People are trying to become cyborgs. They're inserting technology into their brains and into their bodies, which is kind of another way of making love to a robot. But I'm not sure we're going to like the results. When we say in popular culture today, I feel like a robot, which we do say,

we don't actually mean anything technological. We mean something very emotional, not really feeling like yourself, not really feeling fully alive. To say I don't feel real to myself or I feel mechanical, I'm an automatic pilot, or I feel like a robot. All of those things seem to have a lot of different types of references to other forms of oppression. Not just the kind of oppression that you have when you're oppressed by your job, or by your boss, or by your overseer, but the kind of oppression you feel when you're oppressed by your needs, or your limits limits or your everyday life, your desires. Well, that's it for today's show. Thanks for listening.

What you think about I was, I really want to know who, you know, I needed to give you permission to sleep with? No, no. It's just like, I'm a guy. I'm close about these things. I'm like, why? What was the purpose of this game? Like, I still don't understand it. Now I get it. You're asking, like, who do you find attractive? Five years later. Yes.

Special thanks to my wife, Serena, Despina Kakudaki, Mariah McCarthy, Leononica Winkler, Matt Dixon, Darcy Fowler, Alex Harreld, Mara Yamamoto, and my editor, Carrie Hillman. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and close this video. Panoply.