If you haven’t pre-ordered your sexbot, you’d better get in line.
David Levy, artificial intelligence expert, predicts that sex robots will be available by the year 2050 and will be in every home or apartment in the world.
Why do we want or need sexbots, you ask?
In “Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships” (2007), David Levy explores and explains how sex in the future will primarily work through the dynamic use of robots. Levy doesn’t just think robots will supplant realistic sexual interactions, but also provide lovers and life partners for lonely adults seeking companionship as well as sexual comforts.
Women can order their malebot and men can order their fembot with the right personality and attributes. These robots will be a living Kama Sutra, teaching, instructing and experimenting sexually to the owner’s delight. Levy claims that eventually the human will begin to fall in love with their sexbot, filling a lack that most humans have.
Although humans who buy sexbots know the robot is not a living, breathing entity, the fact that they are having sexual relations with a robot will ultimately alter their perception and expectations. An experience is simply that: an experience. One cannot simply remove things from an experience just because they are not favorable or don’t make sense (such as the lack of life).
Whether sex robots will be simply for sexual pleasure or for lifelong companionship, Levy is neglecting issues that really matter. Levy foresees a utopia of happiness and fulfillment. Sexbots are somewhat of a salve for Levy, solving all the world’s issues with sexual fulfillment and programmed companionship. He might be sorely disappointed when the world doesn’t embrace sexbots with the same enthusiasm.
A critic of Levy’s foundational work on sexbots, James Trimarco, writer for Flak Magazine, emphasizes Levy’s central thesis that by around 2050, “love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans.”
Trimarco identifies Levy’s somewhat naïve approach to inducing sexbots into the world as commonalities.
“I believe that the social and psychological benefits will be enormous,” Levy proclaims. “Almost everyone wants someone to love, but many people have no one. If this natural human desire can be satisfied for everyone who is capable of loving, surely the world will be a much happier place.”
Trimarco questions this euphoric approach.
“Will people accustomed to the frictionless courtship of robot love find humans more bother than they’re worth? In an age when people already seem to spend more time with televisions and computers than with one another, what does it mean to eliminate sex as an incentive for human engagement?” says Trimarco.
Ultimately, sexbots challenge natural procreation and stunts human interaction albeit revives many individual’s sex life and self esteem. There are positives and negatives, but worst of all, no one can predict the future and no one can foresee how the public will respond when Levy’s groundbreaking sexbots enter mainstream society.
Whether robophilia is for you or not, in just a few decades malebots and fembots will flood the market. So, the question is: Do you want yours to look like Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp?
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