If there’s a lesson to be learned from an examination of the technical writings within the scope of Strange Creations it would be that scientists, philosophers, technologists and those of the literary world do not remotely speak with one voice when it comes to expectations and/or worry regarding the future of technology. The scientific mind seems to necessitate a predisposition towards answering the question “Can we?” The question of “Can we?” which tends to be the first question on the road to creative, industrious and innovative thought doesn't, however, always lead to the most ethical of outcomes. The next question after “Can we?” and the one that scientists are less concerned with than philosophers and ethicists is the question of “Should we?” Scientists are less apt to stop and question the ethical ramifications of their various endeavors as economics, Capitalism, the thirst for knowledge and their own curiosity all tend to propel the scientific mind forward. Ethical questions, though raised occasionally, tend to take the backburner for the minds that seek progress. And what does a scientific mind seek, if not progress? However, we will give voice to those that would seek to ask the "Should we?" question in the face of technology's ever-upward march. The third question and the one that is most difficult, if not impossible, to answer is “What will the world look like if we do?” This is the realm the truly imaginative mind, where one must weight one hundred thousand previously un-thought of variable and concoct a vision based on estimated guesses stacked upon one another. This realm that asks “What will become of the world” seems to belong to writers, the literary types, those who are able to conceive of expansive futures where nothing can possibly be certain. This is the realm of Phillip K. Dick
Of the thousands of thorny ethical and psychological questions that will crop up over the coming years and decades as we stand on the precipice of creating automata with truly remarkable abilities and realism, perhaps the most complex is what will our relationships be like to these machines? How will relate to them? Will we love them? Will we fall in love with them? Perhaps the toughest question of all is, will we want to invite them into our lives in an intimate capacity? Is there a sexual future for man and machine?
Leaving aside the (mostly) crude machine that already exist to gratify human beings now, most prognosticators of the future of technology believe that we are near the day when we will achieve a new type of sexual relationship with computers. For this paper, we will first explore the obstacles that stand in the way of our first question: “Can we?” For this portion we will examine questions of overcoming the Uncanny Valley, or that portion of automation wherein machines become too human and frighten us. The second question we will seek to answer will come from some technological ethicists who will seek to answer the question “Should we?” Finally, that discussion will dovetail into a discussion of the psycho-sexual relationships present in Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and how it is informed by the biographical info from Dick's own life. While predicting the future is impossible, Dick stands alone in his ability to flesh out a world where the sexual, economic and political meld together in a shockingly believable fashion. Dick’s predictions about the future in Do Androids Dream… presents a ideas which can be reverse-engineered as a metaphoric stand-in for the types of sexual revolution that was going on when the novel for first published and in Dick’s own life, coalescing in the culture wars ongoing today. In other words, Do Androids Dream...shows a future that isn't necessarily different from the present in terms of its cultural make-up and prejudice, but it does show a future where the specific social mores and prejudice have simply shifted. In that regard, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep may be our best and only window into a world that answers the questions “What will the world look like if we do?”
Sexual Robots: Can we? What’s stopping us?
“The initial forays by robotocists into the world of fully interactive autonomous robots focused on entertainment with creations as simple as robot toys robots pets, and robots that play sports. Simple electronic cats and dogs have been shown to provide psychological enrichment for humans, being both pleasurable and relaxing to play with” (Levy 9). For the time being, at least, it seems that robotics is well concerned with finding a way to provide true, satisfying companionship to human beings. This is not a purely or even primarily sexual pursuit. Indeed, one of the main uses going forward for robots that can provide company will be for people who are typical lonely like the elderly, developmentally disabled or those lacking in traditional social graces. Dick presciently predicted this type of reality with the character Isidore whose primary company is machines in his apartment and Buster Friendly on television: “'But,' Isidore said, 'it's good to have neighbors. Heck, until you came along I didn't have any.' And that was no fun, god knew” (Dick 62). Robots that are designed for companionship and company are considered by many robotics-developers to be imminent in the relatively near future: “To researchers like Turkle, the widespread deployment of social robots is as risky as it is inevitable. With some analysts estimating a $15 billion market for personal robots by 2015, the demand for expressive machines is expected to be voracious” (Sofge).
However, while company is one question the question of sexual relationships with robots and androids is quite another. And robots that are able to provide some measure of a satisfying sexual experience are equally imminent according robotocists like David Levy and professional technological prognosticators like Ray Kurzweil. However, providing a “satisfying” sexual experience requires more than just creating a machine that can assume the necessary position and possesses the necessary movement to provide physical pleasure for a human being. “A new generation of AI researcher was investigating more meaningful relationships between humans and what… [is] called “artificial partners (Levy 11). To create a “partner” or a machine that a human being could possibly consider to be on equal sexual and psychological footing (which despite the focus on the sexual depravity of men is generally a requirement for both genders) is a much more difficult task than simply developing the robotics technology. One has to overcome the Uncanny Valley on one of the basest, most fundamentally human level: the level of sexual desire. This is no easy task.
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“The corresponding recess in the supposed function is called the uncanny valley. The core of this explanation… will be a form of empathy involving a kind of imaginative perception. However, as will be shown, imaginative perception fails in cases of very humanlike objects” (Misselhorn 1). The uncanny valley is derived from Freud’s exploration of “the Uncanny” which Freud described as: “The subject of the ‘uncanny’ is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening — to what arouses dread and horror; yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’; certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening” (Freud I). Freud’s “Uncanny” has in recent times become a seminal work cited often, though, usually not in the field of psycho-analysis (Batnaes 1). Robot engineer Masohiro Mori posited the idea that if a robot were sufficiently stylized, that is, had human features but wasn’t actually human, than we would focus on those features that were similar to us and find them empathetic or endearing. However, if a robot crosses a certain threshold of realism we start to look for ways not to think of it as human and any portion of the robot which fails to meet our expectations of what is naturally human causes us to feel revulsion or fright. “It is hypothesized that this uncanny feeling is because the realistic synthetic characters elicit the concept of "human," but fail to live up to it. That is, this failure generates feelings of unease due to character traits falling outside the expected spectrum of everyday social experience (Steckenfinger 1). There is not a great deal of data regarding whether the uncanny valley reaction is based on social condition to fear robots or some inbred defense mechanism hard-wired into our brain. However, what little data there is seems to indicate the former:
These unsettling emotions [of the uncanny valley] are thought to have an evolutionary origin, but tests of this hypothesis have not been forthcoming. To bridge this gap, we presented monkeys with unrealistic and realistic synthetic monkey faces, as well as real monkey faces, and measured whether they preferred looking at one type versus the others (using looking time as a measure of preference). To our surprise, monkey visual behavior fell into the uncanny valley: They looked longer at real faces and unrealistic synthetic faces than at realistic synthetic faces” (Steckenfinger 1).
In the world of Do Androids Dream… concerns about the Uncanny Valley are obviously moot as it requires human beings with an extremely specialized skill-set to be able to tell the difference between a human being and the realistic Nexus-6 replicants. The technology simply doesn’t exist in a mass producible form to create a face and body that have sufficiently human-like actions and reactions. “Natural human faces with abnormal visual features produce uncomfortable impressions” (Seyama). However, whether our attitudes towards sex with robots is based on an inherent emotional response brought on by something natural like a built-in, uncanny valley that resides in all of us, there can be no doubt that the feelings of revulsion created by realistic robots that we are ostensibly to feel amorous feelings toward is the final frontier between human beings and satisfactory robotic sexual partners. “The corresponding recess in the supposed function is called the uncanny valley.
Robotocists like David Levy, however are supremely confident that crossing the divide of the valley is simply a matter of time. Levy believes that within a matter of year, robots will be able to provide for human beings a sexual experience that is satisfying, not only on a physical level, but on an emotional level as well. More so than the uncanny valley Levy sees the Turing test as the final frontier to creating a satisfying sexual partner
[A]s psychology and cognitive science began to consider what relationships might one day develop between man and machine, between human and robot. Suddenly it was important to think about what might happen when a robot communicates with a human on a personal level rather than merely for pragmatic reasons (Levy 11)
The word “partner” Levy mentions earlier is so very important when discussing these relationships because it implies a necessary reality if humans are to have robots as sexual partners, but also a tremendous ethical quandary. With obvious exception, human beings on balance prefer intimacy with someone whom the feel a connection, or with whom they feel they are on even footing. This is why, for example we have laws against statutory rape, as it is understood that a sexual relationship between a young girl and a full grown man is inherently unequal and manipulative. Even if it’s not monogamous or a partnership in the traditional sense, human beings tend to experience feelings of dissatisfaction and sometimes guilt when they have engaged in a sexual liaison that was not mutually satisfactory and enjoyable both physically and psychically. Such a connection with a machine may never be possible without the development of extremely advanced artificial intelligence or at the very least the development of a robot that can perfectly simulate and real sexual relationship.
[Levy] does not shy away from the details of how this could be done. ‘A robot who wants to engender feelings of love from its human,’ Levy speculates, ‘might try all sorts of different strategies in an attempt to achieve this goal, such as suggesting a visit to the ballet, cooking the human's favorite food or making flattering statements about the human's haircut, then measuring the effect of each strategy by conducting an fMRI scan of the human's brain.’ The robot would know it was on the right track when it saw brain activity in the appropriate areas, and continue the successful strategy (Trimarco)
Trimarco finds the scenario he describes above quite distasteful and one would have to assume he wouldn’t be in the minority. Thus, a logical conclusion would be that most human beings would not desire amorous relationships with a robot barring some seismic shift with regard to sexual expectations and social mores.
The Sexual Revolution will not be Televised (except by Buster Friendly)-
“There are those who doubt that we can reasonably ascribe feelings to robots, but if a robot behaves as though it has feelings, can we reasonably argue that it does not? If a robot’s artificial emotions prompt it to say things such as ‘I love you,’ surely we should be willing to accept these statements at face value” (Levy 12). Phillip K. Dick work coerces the reader into asking many questions with regard to his own future. However, what Dick accomplishes with greatest aplomb is to show how the future relies on the past, recycling the problems and solutions of yesteryear in new ways with new players, but still with a fundamental similarity to the past. If sexual encounter with robots requires some type of new sexual revolution, it will be probably be in some part like previous sexual revolutions. As it happens, one of the greatest upheavals of social mores occurred during Phillip K. Dick’s life, with him right in the middle of it. “As for sex, it is [according to treatment notes from an unfinished work of Dick’s] an ‘act of unreason, of impersonality, of unhumanity, of unbeing.’ When a woman lures a man into sex and then later gives birth, her ‘control over the man is complete.’ From out of the depths of mother hatred and adolescent sexual despair, Phil was conceiving a most fearful novel. It is hardly a wonder he could not bring himself to finish it” (Sutin 63). The psycho-sexual revolution of the 60’s and 70’s primarily concerned itself with overthrowing the outmoded Puritanical limitations placed on sex by the culture at large. “Free love” was the order of the day even if it wasn’t embraced by everyone. However, while Dick would almost certainly have preferred the free love movement to the handed-down-from-on-high proselytizing of the previous generation, free love had its own problem which Dick seemed to be acknowledging even before the revolution began. Sex in and of itself doesn’t general provide people with a satisfying emotional satisfaction. In fact, without some semblance of other connection, many if not most people leave a sexual encounter feeling empty or worse abused.
“Phil’s life history shows tendencies characteristic of child incest victims, such as difficult relations with family; drug abuse; repeated suicide attempts, significant memory gaps; low self-esteem accompanied by guilt; a chaotic, crisis-oriented lifestyle; and pervasive mistrust, especially toward the opposite sex, alternating with strong attachments” (Sutin 25). Dick himself had a complicated relationship with sex that mirrors deftly the complicated sexual relationship between Deckard and Rachael Rosen in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Dick’s own sexual development is basically unknowable but almost certainly complex. “[Dick] invited [his friend] Kohler to join him in masturbation sessions in the bedroom, with the blinds drawn. Kohler also slept over on occasion and naturally they discussed sex. There were no overtures: Kohler recalls Phil regarded ‘homosexual’ as a derogatory term” (Sutin 38). Homosexuality provides the best recent case study of the type of sexual revolution Dick evokes with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. While, most people today may find the idea of sex with a robot abhorrent, it is also a relatively new idea that could come to be accepted over time. Homosexuality, while not a new idea, has certainly gained a certain gradual, grudging acceptance that only increases with time. The current generation of 20 year olds is far more likely to be accepting of a homosexual’s lifestyle than their parents as will likely be the case for their children until bit by little bit the prejudice is minimized almost totally to the fringes. In that regard, the sexual revolution of the past decades (and in Dick’s own life) dovetails nicely with a world of future possibilities about the next wave of sexual mores that must be upended: those regard machines. As one must assume Dick himself would have been, many robotocists today are quite certain of an imminent, new sexual revolution. As David Levy states: “By around 2050… love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans.
Sexual Robots: Should we and what will the world look like if we do?
While for Mr. Levy the idea of love and sex with a robot is basically an open and shut case, the relationship between Rachael Rosen and Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep is perhaps a crystal ball that illuminates for us the complex reality of a world where humans and robots have ambivalent relationships to each other, particularly where sex is concerned. For one thing, Dick doesn’t envision a world, even in the future where sex with an android is accepted openly or even legal:
'You're in a spot, Deckard,' Phil Resch said; it seemed to amuse him.
Rick said, 'What - should I do?'
'It's sex,' Phil Resch said.
'Sex?'
'Because she - it - was physically attractive. Hasn't that ever happened to you before?' Phil
Resch laughed. 'We were taught that it constitutes a prime problem in bounty hunting. Don't you know, Deckard, that in the colonies they have android mistresses?'
'It's illegal,' Rick said, knowing the law about that.
'Sure it's illegal, But most variations in sex are illegal. But people do it anyhow.' (Dick 143)
This exchange encapsulates nicely one of the biggest attitudes about sex that was generated by the sexual revolution. No sex act is as fringy and perverted as society wants you to believe. In other words, way more people have a given fetish or sexual appetite than are letting on. Dick drops us off in a world where androids are basically slaves to the whims of their human masters but the humans still desire an android that can provide a level partnership or intellectual equality. If this were the case, that human beings would want intelligent but obedient robots, it would present a lot of ethical problem, most especially where sex is concerned. “Some individuals will surely do as [Levy] predicts and use sexbots to improve their human relationships, but others may come to prefer a form of interaction that offers many of the benefits of love without any of its compromises and disappointments” (Trimarco). In other words, a sort of sexual slavery. Some ethical questions concern the idea of human beings using these sexual robots as a means to further a sociopathic sexual agenda – all the pleasure with none of the emotional hang-ups. “But wouldn't people find love and sex with a machine lacking in emotional connection? Perhaps… but that probably won't stop us, just as it doesn't stop people from visiting prostitutes” (Trimarco)
This type of human-robotic relationship can also certainly have a deleterious effect on humanity, stunting a human being’s emotional development: "At the heart of Turkle’s argument—a call for caution, essentially—is the fear of outsourcing human interaction to autonomous machines. Even more alarming are the potential beneficiaries of robotic companionship, from children in understaffed schools to seniors suffering from Alzheimer’s” (Sofge).
Sherry Turkle, an MIT scientist is one of a few robotics-engineers concerned with the ethical questions that crop up from the furthering of android development. She, like Trimarco fears a world where we are able to use robots as a means of disconnecting ourselves from our own humanity. This appears time again as a theme in Dick’s work as well. There are questions about Deckard’s own humanity. Even though Deckard has supposedly taken and passed a Voight-Kampf Test in the past, there is a great deal of question about that test’s continued effectiveness. Basically, Deckard has no reason to believe in his own humanity anymore.
When Deckard finally has sex with Rachael Rosen, it’s worth noting that the reader is denied a neat summation of questions regarding sex with a machine. We know Rachael is a replicant but the manner in which they finally go to bed together is more an acting out of a preordained manipulation than an expression of love or desire. “After the sex, Rachael apparently feels free to reveal her motives. She tells Deckard that his career as a bounty hunter is over because no man who has gone to bed with her has found it possible afterward to kill any androids. She has had sex with several bounty hunters, she explains placidly and it has worked every time” (Hayles 173). On the other hand, before the manipulation is revealed, Deckard seems quite contented by the entire experience, implying that Dick thought a loving and satisfactory liaison between an android and a machine could be possible, at least from the human’s perspective:
'We androids can't control our physical, sensual passions. You probably knew that; in my opinion you took advantage of me.' She did not, however, appear genuinely angry. If anything she had become cheerful and certainly as human as any girl he had known. 'Do we really have to go track down those three andys tonight?'
'Yes,' he said. Two for me to retire, he thought; one for you. As Rachael put it, the deal had been made.
Gathering a giant white bath towel about her, Rachael said, 'Did you enjoy that?'
'Yes.'
'Would you ever go to bed with an android again?'
'If it was a girl. If she resembled you.' (Dick 196-197)
In that regard, Dick is pointing out that the real fear for human beings when it comes to sex and love with robots is the emotional toll it would take on us emotionally if we were to gain attachments to beings that can’t really have attachments back “’It turns out that we’re vulnerable to attaching, emotionally, to objects. We are extremely cheap dates… Do we really want to exploit that?’” (Sofge). Perhaps the most important argument made indirectly by Dick in Do Androids Dream… is that none of the relationships between the androids and robots are mutually satisfactory. It’s telling that Dick chose to tell his story from the perspective of a bounty hunter of these robots because it shows that ultimately, acrimony is the only possible endgame for these types of relationships.
The ambiguity of Pris’s [sic] motives in this final scene – does she trick Louis because she doesn’t want him around or because she wants him to get on with his life? – indicates that even in a female protagonist figured mostly as a schizoid woman, flashes of the empathetic dark-haired girls still appear. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, these instabilities in the female subject position are exacerbated as the schizoid woman is broken into twin characters, Rachael Rosen and Pris Stratton. The two are of the same model of android, a Nexus-6, so they are physically identical. But they play very different roles in the plot. Rachael becomes for Deckard a particularly ambivalent version of the dark-haired girl. At his low point she comes to him, and they end up in bed in a sexual liaison that Pris and Louis couldn’t manage to bring off. During this scene and the one following, her characterization oscillates wildly between a desirable, empathetic partner and a cold, calculating manipulator. These scenes are worth looking at in detail for what they reveal about the dynamic of the male character who experiences the schizoid woman as a splitting between an android (literally so with Rachael) and the dark-haired girl (Hayles 172).
While Dick doesn’t necessarily point to a specific answer to the sex with robots question, he tells a decidedly pessimistic story and lets the reader draw his own conclusions. In the movie Blade Runner as well, the pairing of Deckard and Rachael Rosen seems to be more a dark and violent affair than something to be aspired to.
“Turkle has studied the powerful bond that can form between humans and robots such as Paro, an almost painfully cute Japanese baby-seal-shaped therapy bot that squirms in your arms, coos when caressed and recharges by sucking on a cabled pacifier” (Sofge). While we can’t yet, the development of a sexual being that is inherently electronic is said by many to be imminent. Many of those involved with the development of robots are more than optimistic about a future full of benefits provided by these types of androids: “It's full of benefits that we're never going to resist—continued growth in economic prosperity, better health, more intense communication, more effective education, more engaging entertainment, better sex” (Kurzweil 91). If Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is about any one thing, it’s a warning to mankind about our willingness to cede too much of humanity to automation. While that doesn’t necessarily preclude the idea of a robotic sexual revolution, just like the sex upheaval of his own life, Dick would certainly be quick to warn it doesn’t provide happiness in and of itself. “Tell me again why I need a robot baby sitter?” Turkle asks. “What are we saying to the child? What are we saying to the older person? That we’re too busy with e-mail to care for those in need?” (Sofge). Sex and falling in love is one of the primary things that makes us human, if we’re willing to give up too much of that, it may be a step in the direction of losing our humanity altogether.
Works Cited
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Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Ballantine, 2002. Web.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny."Web.
Hayles, Katherine. How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print.
Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines. 1st ed. ed. New York: Penguin Group, 1999. Print.
Levy, David. Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relations. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. Print.
MacDorman, Karl F., et al. "Too Real for Comfort? Uncanny Responses to Computer Generated Faces." Computers in Human Behavior 25.3 (2009): 695-710. Web.
Misselhorn, Catrin. "Empathy with Inanimate Objects and the Uncanny Valley." Minds & Machines 19.3 (2009): 345-59. Web.
Seyama, Jun'ichiro, and Ruth S. Nagayama. "Probing the Uncanny Valley with the Eye Size Aftereffect." Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 18.5 (2009): 321-39. Web.
Sofge, Erik. ""the Uncertain Future for Social Robots"." Popular MechanicsPrint.
Steckenfinger, Shawn A., and Asif A. Ghazanfar. "Monkey Visual Behavior Falls into the Uncanny Valley." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106.43 (2009): 18362-6. Web.
Sutin, Lawrence. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. Caroll & Graf Publishers, 1989. Print.
Trimarco, James. "Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships"." flak Magazine.Web. http://www.flakmag.com/books/loveandsex.html
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