Sex with Robots: How Humanity Is Screwing Itself

Developed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, the HRP-4C female robot is able walk and follow some basic commands. The robotic woman is about the same size as an average Japanese young woman, with a height of 62 inches and weighing just 95 pounds.

(Image credit: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology)

In Robot Madness, LiveScience examines humanoid robots and cybernetic enhancement of humans, as well as the exciting and sometimes frightening convergence of it all. Return for a new episode each Monday, Wednesday and Friday through April 6.

COMMENTARY

Latest Videos From

Watch full video here:

And it's only 2009. Cheer up. It gets a whole lot deeper soon. Everyone will know literally everything about you. And resistance is worse than futile; it will be cleansed. Sometime this century — likely sooner than later — the trend lines of human vanity, self-indulgence, quest for personal perfection and general laziness will cross with those of computer processing power, machine dexterity, smart search, molecular manipulation and sensor acuity.

To prosper in this culture of immersive, always-on telepresence, you — or your portable bandolier of technology — have got to be really good at selectively sucking and synthesizing a staggering amount of information. Thus you upgrade your rig every couple of years. You're already paying per month to access that growing cloud of stuff you care about. And you've become a slave to charging batteries and synchronizing platforms. You're already adorned in wearable devices. Next step for you: implanted ones. Our very human need to "always be on top of things" powerfully pushes us in the direction of robotic enhancement. It's precisely what drove your grandparents to buy that first TV.

We poke fun at Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak on his Segway. But we forget that inventor Dean Kamen's team was originally on a quest to bring eye-level mobility and independent living to people who do not have use of their legs. Thus, Segway's DNA came from the successful IBOT. Indeed, years before Segway, Kamen's first invention, the AutoSyringe, robotically delivered a metered dose of insulin or other therapeutic medications into a patient's IV drip. As technologies gain finesse they enter the realm of biology. The more helpful they become, the more insidious they must grow to be.

One step up is the implanted spinal cord stimulator: It's been reported since 2004 that a device originally designed for chronic pain control and urinary issues can stimulate orgasm in women — even individuals who thought they'd lost the ability to have them. The appliance is no bigger than a pacemaker, can be wired into a woman's lower back in a physician's office under local anesthetic, is FDA approved (for "bladder problems"), and can be run by remote control. Ask your doctor.

The philosophers; answer: "of course!" But the engineers tend to think otherwise. As these systems learn more about us, we need not burn up so much creativity on fantasizing sexual love — or on conjuring romantic love — because more and more of our sensory perception field will become "filled-up" with inputs from the robot. Will this simulated sex get so good as to convince us that it's the real thing? How will we know if it isn't?

At that point, the bedrock notion of sexually bonding with your life-partner goes totally out the hatch. It may linger as vestigial dogma for a generation or two, but it will no longer have any survival value. The good news is that you can say so-long to the worship of a large class of largely useless celebrities: Stardom coupled to sexual desirability — or the inferred aptitude of that star as a great lover, no matter the severity of their psychoses — will cease to work.

Why don't we see intelligent extraterrestrials, when the galaxy should be chock full of them? Hubot Roboman tells us the answer: Every technological civilization gets to this point. If you have virtually limitless entertainment everywhere you are, why would you ever go anywhere at all? Any parent whose child plays a game involving a screen and a microprocessor knows this devil all too well. So the number of intelligent species who can kick their addiction to The Too-Easy Life is obviously vanishingly small.

So the root question becomes: Will we be able to impart ambition and curiosity into Hubot Roboman? You know, that restless "mojo" that propelled waves of us out of northern Africa and into the unknown. If Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Bill Joy and others are correct that machine intelligence is inevitable with sufficient computational power, we stand at the edge of a quest as amazing as our ancestors' emergence from the water.