Kate Devlin emphasized the sensationalist allure of robots in her talk at the Literaturmuseum Strauhof last week . Both tabloid and regular news media indulge in the ambivalence that surrounds robots, especially when it comes to sex. A headline about an academic conference titled "Love and Sex with Robots" and hosted by Goldsmith University in 2016 illustrates how faux-Puritan sensibilities are evoked by a familiar mixture of tones: "A festival of SEX ROBOTS is coming to London after being banned in Malaysia for 'being too extreme'." Somewhere between salacious engrossment and implications of perniciousness, human-technology interactions that involve sexuality are turned into a spectacle of deviance, or at the very least, moderate perversity. But there are other approaches to the topic.
The New Yorker is devoting its November issue to technology, a topic that evokes a miasma of feelings comprised of surprise, trepidation, excitement, and disappointment. Patricia Marx provides an overview of robotic companions that may or may not become commercially available to the broader public. She illustrates the clash of expectations and reality, the anxieties and hopes that shape our relationships with them. Shiny and chrome--or more often, white and plastic--they promise a brighter future in which we don't have to carry our own groceries or vacuum, if we are wealthy enough, while also conjuring the inevitable narrative of mass unemployment and general doom.
What becomes clear in her article is that robotic products that are designed to be in homes (and semi-private spaces like offices or care homes, for instance), are made to appeal to our social emotions. If you aren't a technophobe, a neo-luddite, or a disciple of artistic cynicism (like some of Marx's friends seem to be), the cuteness that is built into the aesthetic and mechanism of products like Pepper, Kuri (discontinued), ChiP, or Paro will entice you to feel sympathy, if not empathy.
While this makes it easier for companies to sell the products and for owners to forgive their shortcomings, the thesis seems to be that robots can become part of our daily lives only if they are integrated socially in a way that goes beyond utilitarian necessity. Considering that cuteness doesn't save animals from mistreatment and slaughter, one has to wonder in how far that approach can protect them from human impatience, resentment, or maliciouness. The Q&A after Devlin's indicated a prevalent fear that the way we interact with robots will feed back into how we interact with humans. If people tend to be rude to Alexa, will they become ruder to women in general? If they can have sex with robots outside the paradigm of consent, will that lead to more sexual violence against people?
At this point there is no evidence that interactions with technology impact human in the ways we expect them to. Devlin pointed to the fear that violence in video games would lead to more violence in real life, saying that time and research have disproven that link of causation. Same fears have been raised about sex robots, which some--like Kathleen Richardson--think could exacerbate the objectification of women and create a disconnect between sex and humanity, a concern which, intuitively, one can't dismiss out of hand, but that also ignores possible benefits, and more importantly, the simple reality that the very concept of a humanoid sex robot seems to be very hard to realize, Devlin explained, meaning that the sex robot industry is in its infancy and could very well die there. A realistic humanoid robot that perfects the mimesis to the point that it overcomes uncaniness is still out of reach, Devlin asserted, and sex in the uncanny valley is hard to sell, despite what certain headlines and the industry would have us believe.
For this reason, sex tech tends to move toward abstracted aesthetics and fuctions rather than chasing after biomimetic fantasies, Devlin explained, which recognizes the true potential of technology to expand the range of possible sensory-sensual experiences. With the lack of human (or animal) characteristics, the concerns related to the potential transference of behaviors and attitudes from human-technological relationships to human relationships are rendered somewhat moot.
In the end, what comes to the fore is that the discourse around robots is largely shaped by fantasy, i.e. by their cultural mediation. The reality of robots cannot be seperated from their cultural mediations; their value and their potential is measured against feelings that emerge from a discourse that is often detached from material reality because it prefigures it. There needs to be the odd reminder, it seems, that closes that circuit between imagined constructs and machinic constructions.
Morgane A. Ghilardi