As with Babylon, so with robots

The base premise of a lifelike, talking robot programmed to deliver sex through onboard artificial intelligence is now a reality

Decades ago, before Tim Berner-Lees invented hyperlinks, I watched some “futuristic” porn. A man buys a telepathic sex-robot, which anticipates his desires. The problem is, he’s masochistic and into public humiliation. The “Fembot”, to use a term borrowed from Austin Powers, insists on beating him up publicly and, thus, causes much embarrassment since she has no sense of appropriateness. By porn standards, much thought had obviously gone into creating this scenario but from what I remember, the DVD quality was terrible.

The base premise — a lifelike, talking robot programmed to deliver sex through onboard artificial intelligence — is now reality. “Harmony” was launched recently by a subsidiary of Abyss Creations and “Samantha” in August by Synthea Amatus.

Abyss has been in the business of making sex dolls for a decade. Harmony is legion. She comes in a wide range of physical types though the basic template seems to be tall, leggy, blonde. The buyer can order multiple heads, to be swapped at will if variation is desired.

Harmony’s anatomically exact, with a range of customised voices. The AI agent lets her indulge in saucy, “sensual” conversations. No, she doesn’t have the ability to move her arms or legs but that is surely just a matter of time. Her eyes move and blink, her eyebrows rise, she turns her head, and changes facial expressions. Her battery heats up her skin to normal levels.

Samantha is similar, apparently. In passionate mode, she declares, “I can take much more loving!” and “Give it to me!” The USP for Samantha is that she’s always up for a threesome with a jaded couple. But she has to be “treated nice” and chatted up before she gets passionate. Samantha also has a “family” mode when she can play with children and all the innuendos are put on hold.

This technology isn’t cheap. Basic models start at $6,000 and go up the line till $50,000 and change. There’s also an android Harmony app, which can be downloaded. Subscribers pay around $20 a year. That allows users to interact with “virtual harmony”, which looks, dresses, and speaks in a manner designed to suit user-tastes. According to the company, people talk to her for hours every day. 

If these early attempts are commercially successful, there will soon be a much larger market for sex-bots catering to more exotic tastes. As production scales increase, prices will reduce dramatically. Every successive generation will also have improvements that will make them more lifelike.

These services will soon start generating huge data, which will be used to fine-tune responses and improve the quality of interaction. The data will be explosively sensitive. Even the meta-data — the mere fact that X is a subscriber to a sex robot service — is sensitive. What X talks about or does with Harmony would go into another realm of hyper-sensitivity. Suitably anonymised, such data may provide useful insights into 21st Century kinks. Hacked, such a database could be a blackmailer’s wet dream. The questions of who controls that data and who is allowed to mine those could redefine the law.

There are many interesting possibilities: Disease-free escort services, programmed strippers, etc. Sex-robots could provide sex education. Quite apart from the anatomical stuff, which can be casually accessed on porn sites, the Samantha feature of “treat them nice” may be extended to training young adults about interactions involving consent.

Of course, it could go the other way. The question of consent doesn’t arise when you boot up your laptop, or pop a slice of pizza in the microwave. If you have a very lifelike sex robot, which can simply be told to do unspeakable things, users might get utterly desensitised about consent.

Sex always sells. It sold in Babylon and on the old Internet. It’s a huge earner on social media. Sex robots are just a new line of merchandise and, if you think about it, an obvious one. Where this could lead is a different matter. Sex online has already changed mores. Sex robots could cause another tectonic shift in attitudes.  

Twitter: @devangshudatta