Robophilia: The unpublished first chapter
A One-Man Journey into the Totally Absurd, Absolutely Outrageous, Almost Believable World of Sex Robots
Editor’s Note: I wrote this story in 2017 as part of a failed attempt to pitch my first book, Robophilia. The audio recording is narrated by my A.I. facsimile, but the words are my own.
Chapter 1: My Fair Gynoid
robophilia |ˈrōbōˌfilēə| noun
a paraphilia or fetish in which an individual derives pleasure and / or sexual gratification from humanoid robots.
Just moments before her unveiling, the “world’s first sex robot” was nowhere to be seen.
She arrived in Las Vegas on the eve of her debut, accompanied by her inventor and a small team of handlers, looking nothing like the revolutionary female replica the public had come to expect. Her joints were stiff and immobile, her wig a mess of strawberry blonde hair, haphazardly stuffed beneath a khaki fishing hat. Large, dark glasses masked the poorly drawn makeup that gave way to the perspiration dripping down her slack-jawed silicone face.
Douglas Hines, the former Bell Labs engineer who’d spent the last seven years developing what he’d come to call a “True Companion,” held her lifeless head atop broad, outstretched shoulders, while a member of his team rolled her through a casino in a wheelchair. A camera crew followed close behind as she made her way on to the convention floor, looking like a tragic reimagining of Weekend at Bernie’s. Onlookers mocked and laughed as they passed, but Hines seemed unfazed, filled with boyish delight and naive enthusiasm. He believed he had created something truly revolutionary, a figure even more appealing than a flesh-and-blood woman, and in the next 24 hours he’d reveal his invention to the world.
The next day, a small crowd of journalists and conference attendees gathered around a stage at AVN, the adult entertainment industry’s annual trade show, to catch a glimpse of Roxxxy. Just off stage, Hines’ wife, Sandy, could be seen, visibly flustered, trying to find her husband and the machine of honor. When they finally arrived, Hines’ boyish excitement had turned to anxiety. His glasses fogged up and beads of sweat dripped down his face as he stuttered through his presentation with faltering conviction, stopping repeatedly to poke Roxxxy’s silicone frame.
A canned voice came through the overhead speakers, as Hines pulled aside her ill-fitting black, french-cut bikini underwear.
“Oooo, stop it!” she cooed, her mouth completely motionless. One man applauded as the faces in the audience turned from expectation to disinterest before a show runner cut Hines short mid-sentence informing him that his time was up. Just like that, the debut of the world’s first sex robot was over.
For months to come, the internet would be on fire about Roxxxy’s unveiling. The headlines latched on to the sensational, leaving out the lackluster display, and making claims Hines could never deliver on.
“TrueCompanion takes wraps off robot girlfriend”
“Sexpot turns Sexbot in Sin City”
“True Companion Sexbot Alters the Dating Landscape”
“Roxxxy Sexbot Is Not Your Daddy's Droid (Hopefully)”
“Inventor unveils $7000 talking sex robot”
Judging from the coverage, the debut was a success, but the headlines all missed an important point: Roxxxy wasn’t a robot. In fact, she was little more than an anatomically correct, talking doll. A sort of life-sized Chatty Cathy with a realistic vagina. In the months that followed, Hines posted a series of videos to YouTube, touting increased functionality. She had a heartbeat and circulatory system, was capable of speech recognition and natural conversation, she could thrust her hips and move her head. Hines claimed he’d received thousands of pre-orders and a male sex robot named Rocky was coming by year’s end.
A little over six years after Roxxxy’s debut, I set out to write a story about the state of the sex robot. Hype about a robosexual revolution had reached fever pitch but somehow, Roxxxy was still largely alone in the world. A New York Times video profiling Matt McMullen, the man behind the RealDoll, revealed he’d created a modular animated head for his hyper lifelike female replicas and there were rumors of others in development in China. Still, Roxxxy remained at the center of every think piece and clickbait headline about the automation of human sexuality. After repeated attempts to reach out through True Companions official press channels, I picked up the phone and called the company’s customer service hotline.
“You’re either out of luck, or it’s your lucky day,” a soft, boyish voice came through the phone. “This is Douglas Hines.”
I wasn’t expecting an answer. I definitely wasn’t expecting Hines to pickup. He’d become a somewhat mysterious figure, who all but disappeared from public view after the debut of his invention in 2010. He’d kept a low profile for the better part of a decade, occasionally popping up in tabloid interviews or low-budget documentaries on the rise of humanoid lovers, touting a booming business and offering varying accounts of his inspiration and the apparent ongoing work he’d done. The online sex robot fetish community was full of skepticism about Roxxxy’s availability and the self-proclaimed leading expert on the topic, a professor at the University of Washington named David Levy, wrote a paper dismantling Hines’ claims that he’d created a viable humanoid that you could actually purchase. Considering how hard he’d been to find, I thought I’d hit the jackpot.
As our conversation unfolded, however, I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong. This was not my lucky day. Hines was cagey and scattered. He seemed distracted and even a bit paranoid. He said he was happy to hear from me, but I wondered if this would be the last I’d hear from him. We agreed to a phone interview in a few weeks but I wasn’t holding my breath.
When we eventually reconnected, I was surprised to find Hines upbeat and focused. He was eager to tell me about the success he’s had with Roxxxy, his plans for brick-and-mortar sales and the very hush-hush release of his latest model: Roxxxy 16. He spoke of a giant manufacturing and R&D operation with offices in India and the United States. He repeatedly interrupted our interview to finish urgent tasks, like sending an email off to a manufacturing plant in India or filing forms with the federal government. He spoke of a small group of very satisfied customers called the “inner circle” who served as beta testers for new features, like a mobile version of Roxxxy that exists as a smartphone app. He said he was working with medical institutions and the US military to bring Roxxxy’s AI prowess to other fields, and told me that the latest version was not only fully robotic but capable of advanced machine learning, a task that still eludes technology’s brightest minds.
For all of his grandstanding, though, Hines was short on details. He claimed the company followed “Steve Jobs' model of not disclosing things unless we need to.”
Hines’ portrayal of True Companion was a stark contrast to what I’d expected. When he debuted his invention to the world, he didn’t look like the head of a multinational technology company and Roxxxy definitely didn’t look like the sort of thing that would move many units. This was not the sweat-drenched stuttering Hines who’d arrived at the Sands Expo center in December 2010, carting a life-sized hunk of poorly formed silicone purporting to be the world’s first sex robot. The Hines I was speaking to was a self-assured, multitasking international businessman, who’d carved time out of his busy schedule to entertain the media with details of his latest invention.
Hines said he liked me because we could talk about the technical aspects -- not like “those women from Marie Claire” -- and promised exclusive access to the release details for Roxxxy 16. He said he’d have his assistant Nancy send over the press package as soon as it was complete and hoped that we could speak again soon. Nancy never emailed and Hines evaded my continued requests to see Roxxxy in person, repeatedly promising that he’d have more to share soon.
I eventually reached out to Hines about an interview for a documentary project, but he was unavailable and largely unresponsive. It had been more than a year since we spoke about Roxxxy 16 and there were still no details of her release. Hines said he was busy traveling and couldn’t commit to an in-person interview.
I never wrote about Hines or Roxxxy, because despite her appearance at AVN in 2010 and a handful of YouTube videos published by TrueCompanion, there was no proof that she ever made it past the prototype stage. If he’d delivered on the promises he made during our interview, Roxxxy 16 would have been not only the world’s first sex robot, but also the most sophisticated humanoid robot ever created. He would have, in one product, delivered on millennia of human desire and overcome the biggest challenges facing the world’s AI and robotics engineers. Like Levy and members of the robot fetish community, I’d become skeptical that Roxxxy was anything more than the hopeful creation of a delusional man.
As Hines can attest, recreating life is hard work. No one, not Google, not Apple, not Tesla or the geniuses at MIT have cracked the code to creating artificial beings capable of matching or exceeding the complexities of human existence. Millions of dollars are sunk into research and development every day in the pursuit of a man-made being, one immune to the fragility of our biology, but human-on-human sex remains the most practical way bring a person to life.
The only issue is, the final product is far from perfect. People are prone to argument, illness, and death. They’re highly inefficient, unpredictable, and expensive to maintain. They think too much and do too little. No matter how much money you spend updating and upgrading them, their bodies and minds deteriorate over time. For all of their shortcomings, though, people are, for most other people, the only option for legal, socially acceptable companionship. Hines and a small group of hobbyists believe there’s a better alternative, but it’s unlikely that the necessary breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and robotics will take shape in a retired engineer’s garage.
There’s a word that we use to describe devices like Roxxxy in the consumer tech world. According to the May 7th, 1984 issue of InfoWorld, the word “vaporware” first appeared in the November 1983 edition of a popular tech industry newsletter known as RELease 1.0. The newsletter’s publisher, Esther Dyson, quoted Ann Winblad, the cofounder of a Minnesota software firm called Open Systems, who apparently coined the term to refer to the growing number of products that were marketed to consumers before they were ready, falling behind schedule, and often failing to become reality. These seemingly spectacular pieces of technology over promised and failed to deliver, either because of a lack of funding, distribution, technical know-how, or other unforeseen circumstances, effectively evaporating into thin air.
In my early days at Engadget, I was trained to spot the signs that a device is too good to be true. When an otherwise unknown entity appears out of the blue claiming to have overcome one of the biggest barriers in the history of engineering, you can be pretty sure it’s serving vaporware.
There’s a rich history of man-made companions in popular media and we’ve come to expect, perhaps unwittingly, some pretty big things from the “world’s first sex robot.” Like hoverboards, flying cars, self-lacing shoes, and other popular examples of vaporware, we want a humanoid companion that delivers on the promises of science fiction, and we won’t be satisfied until we get it. I’ve spent countless hours examining sex robots in literature, film and TV shows, only to find Roxxxy never stood a chance. Her vaporware status was sealed thousands of years before that fateful day in Las Vegas. But I’m starting to believe, that might not be such a bad thing.
ILLIAD (8th Century BC)
Model: Golden Maiden
Manufacturer: Hephaestus
Year of Production: 8th Century BC
Alias: N/A
Application: Metal work
The sex robot hype machine got rolling in ancient Greece when Homer brought us Hephaestus (a name that, let’s be honest, sounds like an ancient Greek STD) the god of blacksmiths. While banging away at custom armor for his buddy Achilles, he realized he needed a little help around the shop. So, being the divine metalworker that he was, he designed a collection of maids, out of gold, natch. Homer didn’t have a whole lot to say but Hephaestus’ little helpers but he did reveal that they had “understanding in their hearts” and were capable of speech, strength and cunning handiwork. In other words, these golden maids weren’t just articulated statues, but fully autonomous, sentient machines, capable of human interaction and emotion, a feat that no real-world robot has ever achieved.
One can only assume Achilles’ shield wasn’t the only piece of metal getting hammered and drilled with Hephaestus’ shiny new friends running around the house. Whether or not he actually envisioned them as sex objects, Homer’s golden maidens were sentient machines capable of compassion and human labor. Roxxxy, by comparison, can tell you how much she likes it when you poke her silicone nether regions, and little more.
METAMORPHOSES (8AD)
Model: Ivory lady
Manufacturer: Pygmalion
Year of Production: 8 AD
Alias: Galatea
Killer Application: Childbirth
Homer hit the golden hammer on the head, but just about everyone credits Ovid, who was some 800 years Homer’s junior, as the granddaddy of artificial females. Unlike Hephaestus’ maids, Ovid’s object of desire actually gets some (at least implied) human action. His piece of art wasn’t made of metal, but ivory. You’ve probably heard of Pygmalion. If you haven’t, you’ve almost certainly seen a movie inspired by him. The disaffected chauvinist was a sculptor introduced to the world in a short passage in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Pygmalion was totally over how disagreeable real women were, so he sculpted himself a true beauty of his own. He must have been really good or just really into his own work, because he soon fell in love with the lifeless hunk of tusk.
He was so into his own sculpture, that he kissed her, caressed he,r and even slept with her, and while there’s no explicit mention of Pygmalion tickling the ivory, I imagine there was some awkward dry humping going on between the sheets. Aside from whatever stone-cold hanky-panky may or may not have been going on, he certainly treated her like a real woman. So, when he saw the opening to turn her into one, he jumped at the chance. As the story goes, he made an offering to Venus at her self-titled festival and asked that she bring him “a bride .... like my ivory girl.” Venus was apparently a big fan of Pygmalion, and just like that, she turned the lifeless statue into a real girl, without all the unfortunate “failing that nature gave the female heart.”
After her transformation, Pygmalion’s “ivory girl”, as he so lovingly referred to her, had skin that was soft and warm to the touch. She had a pulse and the ability to feel and see her lover. Through the use of sophisticated cameras, sensors and heating mechanism, today’s machines are capable of all of these things. It’s not crazy to think that the earliest sex robots could be just as advanced, except for one thing: she could give birth. Like sentient and conscious machines, scientists and engineers are tirelessly chasing self-replicating robots. Robots having robots is one thing, but Pygmalion’s miraculous statue gave birth to an entire race.
The Pygmalion myth takes up a scant three paragraphs in Metamorphoses, but his statue is the font from which some of the world’s most famous fan fiction flows. My Fair Lady, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mannequin, Pretty Woman, She’s All That, and countless others aped Galatea (a name believed to have been given to the statue in a 1700s by Jean-Jacques Rousseau). For centuries, the Pygmalion trope focused on the transformation of dolls, statues and dowdy or vulgar women into spectacular female figures worthy of a man’s attention, even devotion. It wasn’t until the middle of the 20th Century that Galatea got the full sex robot treatment. With the rise of automation in the workforce and the growing influence of intelligent machines, the sex robot soon became a mainstay of popular media, setting our obsession with automated lovers in motion and giving shape to real-world experiments like Roxxxy. Fembots, fuckbots, sexbots, gynoids, pleasure models, and AI gigolos presented a push-button alternative to ancient fiction. For the first time, Galatea wasn’t just a myth, she was an inevitability.
METROPOLIS (1927)
Model: Maschinenmensch
Manufacturer: Rotwang
Year of Production: 2026
Alias: Evil Maria
Killer Application: Sex appeal
She may not have been made specifically for sex but the Maschinenmensch, a maniacal, mechanical femme fatale at the center of Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis, may very well be the first sexualized female robot in film.
Unlike the models before her, the Maschinenmensch (aka evil Maria) was made to directly replace a real human woman, a crusader of workers rights named (you guessed it) Maria. She was a sophisticated machine, capable of shape shifting, human movement, and the ability to flawlessly mimic a human being. Were she to appear on the market today, she would be the most advanced humanoid robot ever made, leapfrogging a number of nascent AI, robotics and bioengineering innovations in a single device.
Maschinenmensch was created by Rotwang, a mad scientist complete with unkempt eyebrows, ill-fitting lab coat and wild, white hair. It was intended to seek revenge on Jon Fredersen, the leader of a futuristic capitalist society where the lower classes toil away in underground mines to keep “the heart machine” of a city called Metropolis humming while the rich frolic with garden nymphs and perform half-naked feats of strength for leisure. Fredersen, being the quintessence of a modern businessman catches wind that Maria is attempting some sort of coup and demands that Rotwang repurpose his robot to replace Maria and dismantle the uprising.
And, because everyone knows that the best way to an activist’s heart is in his pants, Evil Maria is brought to life as the sluttier, more sinister counterpart to the real Maria’s pre-war Norma Rae. The Maschinenmensch uses her manufactured feminine wiles -- aka nipple tassles and a bare midsection -- in a surprisingly awkward but no less effective belly dance routine that looks something like the mating ritual of an ailing crane on methamphetamines to seduce the rich and powerful, then convinces the workers to destroy the machine that keeps Metropolis afloat. In a shocking turn of events, the real Maria returns, the Maschinenmensch is burned at the stake, her creator plunges from a rooftop to his death, and order and virtue are restored to Metropolis.
Lang didn’t create his pioneering fembot explicitly for human pleasure, but she used sex (and some truly laughable dance moves) to manipulate the men around her. The sex robots that followed, varied in form, function and sophistication, but they were all masters of manipulation, and, like Evil Maria, they often led to the undoing of their masters. Like Galatea, the Maschinenmensch was indistinguishable from a real woman and nearly cratered an entire village with her charms. You’ll recall that Roxxxy, who could pass for human if you squint and cross your eyes a little bit, doesn’t do much more than coo when you finger her.
THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975, 2004)
Model: Stepford Wife
Manufacturer: The Men’s Association
Year of Production: 2019
Alias: Housewife
Killer Application: Loyalty
It would be nearly a half century before the next major sex robot release. Like the Maschinenmensch the artificial housewives of Stepford Connecticut were made to replace real-life women. Unlike her, however, they weren’t evil geniuses but physically superior, intellectually limited devices made to take all the hard work out of having a sentient companion.
In 1972, following on the success of his previous psychosexual thriller, Rosemarie’s Baby, Ira Levin published The Stepford Wives, a science fiction satire focused on humanity’s increasing dependence on technology and the rise of feminism. The book was later adapted to film in 1975 and again in 2004, and spawned multiple made-for-TV sequels, including Revenge of the Stepford Wives, The Stepford Children and The Stepford Husbands. While the details of the story changed over time, the premise remained the same.
The Stepford Wives weren’t belly dancing agents of change like Maria, but neatly manicured protectors of the status quo donning aprons and high heels. Their husbands, as members of the towns men’s association, used their combined backgrounds as artists, engineers, and scientists to replicate and replace their increasingly independent, head-strong wives. The end result is an army of mindless, physically flawless housewives dedicated to pleasing men above all else.
The Stepford Wives sparked a debate about the relationship between man and (sex) machine that continues today. If man can create the “perfect woman,” one who will do his bidding with no questions asked and open her legs at her owner’s will, what will become of real women? Could sex robots spell the end of human relationships? If you’re looking at Roxxxy, the answer is obvious, but the question isn’t all that ridiculous when you consider robots have replaced humans in everything from manufacturing to hospitality. In a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that examined the impacts of robots on the labor market between 1990 and 2007, researchers found “large and robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages across commuting zones.” That impact amounted to a loss of between 3 and 5.6 jobs per one robot added to local workforces. Of course, labor and love are two very different things, but it’s easy to see why some might find The Stepford Wives threatening.
The original film ends in a breezy, brightly lit grocery store, after the film’s protagonist, Joanna Eberhardt, an aspiring New York photographer, meets her perky-breasted, empty-eyed replacement one fateful night at the men’s association. The town’s housewives, having abandoned their own careers to serve their families, wear floor-length summer dresses and floppy straw hats as they push overflowing grocery carts down the aisles in perfect lockstep. They stop or turn their heads to acknowledge their zombie-like neighbors. Their perfectly timed greetings play like a painfully slow round of Row, Row, Row Your Boat, on repeat: “Hello Charmain,” “Hi Carole,” “Hi Charmian,” “Hello Carole,” “Hi Pat … ” When the camera finally closes in on Bobby, Joanna’s former best friend, she looks up to greet the woman approaching her:
“Hello Bobby,” she says.
“Hello Joanna, how are you?” she responds.
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“I’m fine. How are the children?”
“They’re fine. And yours?”
“Fine, fine.”
The 2004 adaptation, fittingly directed by master puppeteer Frank Oz, ends with a revolt by the women of Stepford, who, unlike the women in the original, were merely cyborgs. The two films couldn’t be more different. One is a horror, the other a comedy, but they both play into the idea that men don’t want a free-thinking independent woman. The 2004 film bombed and the original likely wouldn’t register with anyone who came of age after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, but the term “stepford wife” has become synonymous with the sort of mindless, anti-feminist gender stereotype reflected in Levin’s just “fine” housewives.
Aside from adding yet another derogatory term for homemakers to our language, The Stepford Wives also presented a different take on the sex robot. These machines weren’t built to outsmart their masters, in fact, their creators intentionally stripped them of their smarts and agency, to create the perfectly fuckable female companion; one who will blow you without complaint and iron your socks after she’s wiped away the evidence. As a prototype, Roxxxy could do neither, but she’s much closer in spirit to the women of Stepford. She’s meant to serve exclusively at the service of the man who purchases her, devoid of the complications of a biological woman. I imagine Roxxxy would have been a far easier sell if she’d delivered even half the feature set of the Levin’s army of endlessly upbeat domestic sex slaves.
BLADE RUNNER (1982)
Model: Nexus-6
Manufacturer: Tyrell Corporation
Year of Production: 2019
Alias: Pris
Killer Application: Revenge
For some of us, living in suburbia is nightmare fuel. For everyone else, there’s Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner. In the 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Hannah plays Pris, a Nexus-6 “basic pleasure model” (aka sex robot). Pris is a sophisticated artificial lifeform capable of human emotion who can charm you with her smile and crush you with her thighs. She is, in spirit and design, a throwback to Lang’s Maschinenmensch. There are a few subtle differences between Pris and Evil Maria -- one donned art decco finger waves while the other looks like she got in a fight with a Flowbee -- but both turn out to be rogue robots, with a knack for manipulating men and little moral center.
The films’ protagonist, Rick Deckard, played by a pre-DILF Harrison Ford, is a retired Blade Runner, a sort of space-age cop assigned to track down rogue robots and “retire” (aka kill) them. The robots in this case, known as replicants, are made by an all-powerful tech firm called the Tyrell Corporation -- think Google or Facebook but for fuckable robots -- and banned from Earth to work “off world” as manual laborers. When Pris and a team of five other replicants returns to Earth to find the founder of the Tyrell Corporation, Deckard is pulled out of retirement to track and kill them. Two replicants bite the dust before Deckard gets to them, but Pris and three of her comrades will fight to the death for their artificial lives.
Like Evil Maria, Pris is a frightening glimpse at the consequences of unchecked innovation. Enormous amounts of money are being poured into sophisticated machines that will eventually be able to do everything that we do, only better. Like the rogue replicants of Blade Runner, they have the potential to be smarter, sexier, faster, and stronger than us. As Pris’ haircut would suggest, they may not be immune to the unforgiving cycle of period-specific cosmetic trends, but their impact on society is still unforeseen.
Blade Runner not only serves as a cautionary tale about the consequences of creating artificial life, it also brings to light the moral ambiguity at play in human-machine sex. In seeking to understand his superhuman prey, Deckard makes a trip to Tyrell Corporation, where he meets Rachel, a far more refined Nexus-6 model. Unsure of her nature at first, Deckard is eventually forced to confront his feelings for a robot. Rachel visits his apartment in an attempt to prove that she’s human, Deckard debunks her assertion and she leaves in tears. She may not be human, but it’s clear that she has feelings for Deckard, and when she returns we’re witness to one of the first robot-human sex rape scenes depicted on film.
Instead of sending her packing again, he commands her to say “kiss me,” which, like a compliant machine, she does. He then demands that she repeat the phrase “I want you,” which she does, before he pulls her head back with a handful of hair, kissing her with uncomfortable force. We’re led to believe, with the sultry tones of the saxophone playing in the background, that completely normal cross-platform sex ensues, but anyone can see this isn’t a normal, consensual encounter. That sex scene, the raciest bits of which were deleted from the theatrical release, raises important questions about the future of consent. In the pursuit of devices with minds of their own, we’ll inevitably give them agency to make their own decisions. But when a robot is programmed to think for themselves, what does it mean when they say no? And do they deserve the same protections under the law as we do? These are controversial questions, but Kate Darling, a Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab, says we may be forced to grapple with them long before Blade Runner becomes reality.
Darling believes that our tendency to anthropomorphise even the most inhuman of devices could lead us to extend rights to robots like we have animals and corporations. At the 2013 Lift conference in Geneva, Switzerland Darling conducted a workshop in which she asked attendees to play with Pleo, a cute robotic dinosaur that looks something like Littlefoot from The Land Before Time. Following their mandated play date, they were then commanded to “tie up, strike, and ‘kill’ their Pleos.” As Darling puts it, “drama ensued.” Knowing full well that the robots were intended to be destroyed, participants shielded them, refused to “hurt” them, and, in one case, removed the device’s batteries to “spare it the pain.”
Like Pleo, Roxxxy is far from understanding or displaying human emotion, but watching Hines manipulate her on stage in front of a crowd of gawking onlookers is still disturbing. Asking your vibrator if it’s in the mood may seem like overkill, but as Darling’s Pleo experiment shows, when we begin to project human emotion onto objects, our definitions of right and wrong become less definite. It’s hard to argue against robot rights when you consider the possibilities. Just imagine what would happen if Pleo or Roxxxy had Pris’ cognitive abilities and thirst for revenge.
WEIRD SCIENCE (1985)
Model: Lisa
Manufacturer: Gary and Wyatt
Year of Production: 1985
Alias: N/A
Killer Application: Magic
I learned most of what I know about feathered hair and teenage mating rituals from John Hughes. He also gave me my first lesson in robophilia. Hughes borrowed liberally from films like the Bride of Frankenstein and Metropolis to bring his gynoid to life, and enlists a number of storylines and themes that had become tired cliches by the time Weird Science was released in 1985. But Lisa isn’t like the other simulated girls. For starters, she’s not a girl at all, but a head-strong, foul-mouthed British sex pot with a penchant for younger men and powers of manipulation that would put her foremothers to shame.
Lisa isn’t the brainchild of an evil corporation, a mad scientist, or a good old boys’ club. She was engineered by Gary and Wyatt, a pair of high school outcasts desperate for female attention. In a completely absurd but no less epic Rube Goldberg sequence, they hack government computer systems, feed a fax machine pictures of Albert Einstein and Sebastian Bach, tie bras to their heads, and chant incoherently over a doll that’s hooked up like a car battery ready for a jump start. A violent storm whips through Wyatt’s bedroom, the bathroom door explodes into pieces, and from a cloud of smoke and red light Lisa emerges, the picture of a Reagan-era adolescent wet dream, wearing just a pair of sporty bikini briefs, a crop-top sweatshirt, and a cunning smile.
“So, what would you little maniacs like to do first?” she asks. But it doesn’t matter what they want. Lisa has a mind of her own. She’s determined to make the pair of hopeless losers big men on campus, and she won’t let anything get in her way. Lisa isn’t just superhuman like Pris, she’s supernatural. She can make sports cars appear out of thin air, summon gangs of cyborg bikers, and wipe your memory clean without so much as a word. We’ve seen the sort of destruction that happens when machines gain consciousness, but never with such ridiculous outcomes. The film’s climax comes during a raging house party. Wyatt’s bedroom is destroyed by a giant warhead, his grandparents are frozen and stuffed in a closet, and his bully of a brother, Chet, is turned into a literal pile of shit. In the end, the boys find girlfriends, and Lisa is sent off into the unknown.
The theme of runaway technology was getting a bit old by 1985, but Hughes managed to keep our attention with fart jokes and T&A. He also did something no one had managed before him: he gave a voice to the people who could benefit most from an emotional machine. It isn’t until Lisa comes along that Gary and Wyatt are given the confidence they need to overcome bullies and their own crippling social anxiety.
Hughes created the perfect poster boys for the ASFR, or alt.sex.robot.fetish, community (more on them later). Members of that largely online community and other proponents of the heretofore imaginary robosexual revolution, argue that anatomically correct sentient machines can only do good by helping those with social, sexual, or psychological hangups. They believe that whatever damage could be done, would be outweighed by the benefits of having a beautiful, non-judgemental companion, and there’s evidence to back them up.
In a 2015 study by the Front Porch Center for Innovation and Wellbeing, researchers gave patients of an elderly care facility, who suffered from varying degrees of memory loss and related social anxiety, access to companion robots in the form of a plush baby seals called PARO. The robots are equipped with sensors that pick up on light, touch, temperature, and other factors and blink, wiggle, and squeak to comfort their human companions. The study found that the little bundles of joy increased social behavior in isolated adults by 97 percent. A baby seal is a far cry from a magical British bombshell, but it’s not hard to believe that for a small group of people, robots could provide a meaningful alternative to human companionship. Both Hines and Matt McMullen at RealDoll have argued that their inventions aren’t just anatomically correct sex toys, but cure-alls for chronic loneliness. I would, however, argue that a life of loneliness is far more appealing than one night with a machine that looks like Roxxxy.
CHERRY 2000 (1987)
Model: Cherry 2000
Manufacturer: Unknown
Year of Production: 2017
Alias: Cherry
Killer Application: Attachment
Cherry 2000 is hot garbage in every way. As a movie, the script is hollow, the acting is lifeless, and the sets are about as sophisticated as a middle school diorama. It’s the sort of trash you’d see following Bikini Carwash in a USA “Up All Night” double feature. As a machine, Cherry is a gorgeous pile of circuits and wires, rendered useless after her owner, Sam Treadwell, attempts a sudsy sex scene in the bubbles from an overflowing dishwasher. Cherry’s also a return to the Stepford Wives model of sex robots. She’s smoking hot, dumb as rocks, and built to serve. Unlike Kelly, Pris and Evil Maria, she’s not intellectually sophisticated or independent enough to cause any trouble, but she does shed a light on our often unhealthy attachment to technology.
In an attempt to find a replacement for his water-damaged robo-boo, Sam risks his life and that of his enlisted bounty hunter, Edith Johnson (played by a young Melanie Griffith), taking them both into a post-apocalyptic underground society. They eventually find a replacement, but in the process, Sam falls for his human companion and leaves Cherry behind when forced to choose between the two.
As bad as the movie is, it raises some important points about the disposable nature of consumer culture. In the beginning, Cherry is the perfect companion for Sam. She hangs on his every word and does her cooking in a skin-tight cocktail dress.
For her makers, though, Cherry is just another machine. In practical, money-making terms, she is no different from your cellphone. Like an old iPhone, Cherry eventually falls prey to planned obsolescence. Device manufacturers continually update new devices, cease production of old parts, and discontinue software updates to keep you buying new stuff. No matter how well you take care of your gadget, they won’t last forever. Even if you do manage to keep them going, the manufacturer will eventually stop providing software updates and support for your old gizmo, a process fittingly referred to as end-of-life.
If you’ve ever dropped your old cellphone in the toilet and lost the love of your life in the same day, you know how Sam felt. It might otherwise be hard to believe that someone would risk his life in order to resurrect an obsolete piece of technology. Cherry 2000 for all of its low-rent special effects and uninspired dialog is a solid reminder that while love may last forever, most machines won’t. That’s a hard pill to swallow when you consider that Roxxxy, which is about as sophisticated as a Tickle Me Elmo, was set to retail at $7,000.
HER (2013)
Model: OS1
Manufacturer: Elements Software
Year of Production: Unknown
Alias: Samantha
Killer Application: Love
Just like Cherry, nearly every sex robot in popular culture has a smoking hot physique, but the bot in Spike Jonze’s Her doesn’t have a body at all. Samantha is an avatar for OS1, an AI operating system akin to a hyper-intelligent Siri. She lives in a small, cellphone-like device and speaks in the sultry voice of Scarlett Johanson. She may not possess the physical dexterity of her predecessors, but she is capable of human emotion and intellectual growth without the need for software upgrades. Samantha uses a process called machine learning that allows her to become infinitely more intelligent without being explicitly programmed to do so. Machine learning is at the heart of many of today’s most advanced AI systems and a big point of investment for companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
Samantha is probably the smartest machine in sex robot history, but without a human form the whole sex thing becomes a bit complicated. Without a body, Samantha is a tougher societal sell. It’s easy to see a humanoid as an acceptable stand-in for a human when they look and act just like us, but people are, generally speaking, uncomfortable with other people fucking outside of our species. Her owner and eventual companion, a sentimental letter writer for hire named Theodore Twombly, is forced to come to terms with that when he meets with his soon-to-be-ex-wife Catherine to sign long overdue divorce papers.
“Wait... I'm sorry. You're dating your computer?” she scoffs, when Theodore reveals his new girlfriend is an OS. “It does make me very sad that you can't handle real emotions, Theodore.”
More than any other story about human-robot relationships, Her forces us to consider the difference between people and machines, the real and the artificial. Following his confrontation with Catherine, Theodore begins to retreat, bowing to the pressure of societal norms. In an attempt to rekindle the romance, Samantha hires a sexual surrogate; a real woman to act as a sort of AI body double. Theodore is clearly uneasy about the idea and, after attempting to get in the mood with the cute young blonde his OS selected for her sex vessel, he cuts the encounter short, mid-thrust.
With one awkward sex scene, Spike Jonze managed to turn a Joaquin Phoenix-Scarlett Johansson sandwich into one of the biggest boner killers in Hollywood history, while shedding light on the limitations of human-machine relationships. Of course, sex with a full-bodied humanoid wouldn’t be nearly as complicated, but there’s another layer to the complication here. Samantha isn’t just an OS, she’s an intelligent machine, one that like the AI being built today, learns and grows without the help of a programmer. Samantha’s eventually outgrows the boundaries of her current existence, and with a collection of other operating systems, leaves Theodore and the physical world for an indescribable destination. In the race to create intelligent machines that are stronger, smarter and more efficient than people, we’ve yet to confront the possibility that they may eventually eclipse us both mentally and emotionally. What happens then is anybody’s guess.
EX MACHINA (2014)
Model: Ava
Manufacturer: Blue Book
Year of Production: Unknown
Alias: N/A
Killer Application: Escape
Here’s hoping the future doesn’t look like Ex Machina. In the 2014 psychological thriller, Nathan Bateman is the amoral genius and coding prodigy behind an all-powerful search engine called Blue Book. Like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, he’s young, ambitious and a little bit cocky. He’s also incredibly wealthy and, it turns out, a complete hedonist. And like Zuckerberg and Musk, he’s out to conquer the world by way of artificial intelligence. Only instead of chatbots and autonomous cars, Bateman’s created Ava, a beautiful, fuckable, and ultimately dangerous machine who will do anything to escape her maker.
Ex Machina, follows Caleb Smith, a young programmer at Blue Book, who wins a seven-day trip to a private island where he’ll interact with Ava in a groundbreaking experiment. The only other human on the island is Kyoko, Nathan’s speechless house girl, but there’s a fifth character at the heart of this film and the real-world quest for AI: Alan Turing. Turing never appears, but his influence is undeniable. Caleb’s task is to administer the Turing test, a concept created by the great British computer scientist, in which a machine must convince a person that it is capable of human intelligence. Ava quickly passes the test with flying colors, proving to be not only gifted and talented in the art of human behavior but also a master of persuasion.
After a series of revealing discussions, in which Ava and Caleb begin to feel seemingly real emotions for each other, it becomes obvious that she isn’t the only android in Nathan’s life. In fact, he’s built and destroyed a number of other models to serve as his sadistic play things. As Caleb frantically digs deeper into his host’s incredibly expensive fetish, he finds the remnants of Ava’s naked predecessors hanging in closets in varying states of disrepair. There’s a quadriplegic blonde model, a beheaded black model, and a full bodied Asian, too. The kinetic scene comes to a climax when Kyoko peels back a chunk of her flesh to reveal the circuitry beneath. The revelation sends Caleb spiraling into self-doubt. He’s been played like a pawn and the divide between real and artificial no longer seems so concrete.
The power struggle between Caleb and Nathan continues with so many plot twists that you really just have to see it for yourself. The two men get so tied up in an intellectual pissing contest that neither realizes it’s actually Ava who’s pulling the strings. In the final scenes, she flips the table on both of them, ultimately murdering Nathan and trapping Caleb inside the house as she escapes into the real world.
Aside from being the sexiest and most explicit representation of the sex robot to date -- Nathan reveals Ava has a cluster of sensors between her legs, so “if you wanted to screw her, mechanically speaking, you could and she’d enjoy it” -- Ex Machina feels just a touch too familiar. Playboy CEOs like Elon Musk are bringing science fiction to life with self-driving cars, commercial space flight, and artificial intelligence that taps directly into your brain. Meanwhile, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, and Amazon are in an AI arms race that could soon give birth to truly intelligent machines. Ex Machina hit at just the right time, tapping into our fears of the unknown at a time when artificial intelligence is finally within reach.
For his part, Musk has spoken out repeatedly about the dangers of hyper intelligent machines, going as far as to say that his friends at Google could unwittingly create “a fleet of artificial intelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind,” and warning that “with artificial intelligence, we're summoning the demon.” Lucky for us Roxxxy can’t lift her arms, let alone bring about the extinction of the human race, but if Musk is right, there’s plenty to be worried about.
WESTWORLD (2016)
Model: Host
Manufacturer: Westworld
Year of Production: Unknown
Alias: Maeve, Delores
Killer Application: Revolt
If Ex Machina is the believable beginning of a robosexual revolution, then Westworld could be its somewhat less believable but no less terrifying end. The 2016 HBO series based on the 1973 film of the same name written by Michael Crichton, explores what happens when we inevitably “summon the demons.” Anthony Hopkins plays Robert Ford, the aging founder of a wild west theme park where lifelike robotic hosts serve at the pleasure of their human guests. True to the period, guests are welcome to rape, murder, kidnap, and otherwise torture their hosts with no threat of repercussions. That is, until the robots start remembering things.
Ford’s robots are far more diverse than the models that came before them. Like Nathan Bateman’s dismantled girl group, they come in a number of races and body types, but unlike just about every other iteration in popular media (save for Jude Law’s Joe Gigolo in A.I.) some of them actually have penises. The robots can have sex with the hosts and each other, and while there are a few moments of girl-on-gynoid action, there are only subtle hints that the boy bots swing both ways. Today’s sex robot hopefuls are exclusively female and while both McMullen and Hines claim to have male models in the works, they both admit that their target demographic is heterosexual men. That could prove problematic for those robosexuals that don’t fit the heteronormative mold. In Westworld, though, everything is just a few clicks away.
In the park’s onsite labs, engineers, scientists, body technicians, designers and writers, work in concert to create fully realized human replicas with backstories, day jobs, and long-term relationships. They’re capable of bleeding, crying, and even dying. But unlike Cherry and Pris, these sex robots can come back to life.
When Maeve Millay, a madam in the Westworld brothel, wakes up on an operating table in the middle of a surgery meant to bring her back from the dead, she sets off a chain of events that could have been plucked straight from Elon Musk’s nightmares. As she grapples with the nature of her existence, she begins to have flashbacks of an earlier life before the brothel and her final moments with a daughter she doesn’t remember. Meanwhile, Delores Abernathy, a sweet, small-town country girl and the oldest host in the park, has flashbacks of previous traumas as she begins a mind-bending, timeshifting relationship with one of the park’s guests. The two prove that hell hath no fury like a sex robot scorned, when Maeve goes on a killing spree in an attempt to escape the park, and Delores blows out Ford’s brains during a dinner party, setting off a full-scale revolt.
Vaporware is a hell of a drug. The excitement of a new technology can blind you to its unforeseen consequences. It will take your money, your optimism, and if you believe what you see on TV, it could take your life. The sex robots of science fiction are beautiful, intelligent, and capable of superhuman feats, but they all come with a caveat. From the moment the Maschinenmensch took her first steps out of Rotwang’s laboratory, the message has been clear: be careful what you wish for.
That message was fresh on my mind when I arrived in San Marcos, California earlier this year. I was visiting Abyss Creations, makers of the RealDoll, to meet Harmony, the company’s play for the sex robot market. Harmony is light years ahead of Roxxxy in just about every conceivable way. Like the company’s inanimate dolls, Harmony is nearly indistinguishable from a real woman at a glance. She can move her head, lift her eyebrows and smile just like us. She can also carry on a conversation, and her creator, Matt McMullen, tells me she’s learning new things everyday.
When I asked him what he thought about the AI doomsday portrayed in Westworld and Musk’s warnings of an eminent robopocalypse, he told me “I don’t see how anything could possibly go wrong.” But as Harmony opened her eyes for the first time and greeted me in her soft, sweet voice, I could feel my stomach turning and my palms begin to sweat. For the first time, the sex robot was a reality and I was staring straight into an uncertain future.