Turned On by Kate Devlin

Author:Kate Devlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER SIX

Killer Gynoids and Manic Pixie Dream Bots

I’m not going to claim that I have read every book available that has a sex robot in it – or try to list them all here. I’ve certainly read some that stick in my mind (Chris Beckett’s eerily imaginable The Holy Machine springs to mind, as does Cassandra Rose Clarke’s beautiful The Mad Scientist’s Daughter). Nor have I watched every sex robot film. There are many. There are those featuring a robot in a key role where desire and love are central to the plot: Steven Spielberg’s AI, or Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Others merely depict them as a background player. The past few years have seen the rise in the number of TV shows based around robots, consciousness and humanity, including those where sex is a plot element. In the UK, Channel 4’s Humans (based on the Swedish drama Real Humans) depicts a near-future setting where anthropomorphic robots called ‘Synths’ are commonplace as service robots, some of whom can have sex, including those used specifically as sex workers. HBO’s Westworld reboot has become a huge success – the story of robot ‘hosts’ who are there to fulfil the human guests’ fantasies, including the sexual ones.

The 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl is a sweet comedy-drama that explores the life of a socially awkward young man and his romantic relationship with a RealDoll. It is an offbeat but sincere story exploring attachment, loneliness and anxiety – and the doll is shown as a therapeutic way for a community to reach love and acceptance. It may be fiction but it has its roots in the reasons that people want and need these artificial lovers: unwavering, unconditional companionship built to your specification.

In the process of writing this book I tried very hard to immerse myself in filmic worlds where artificially intelligent and sexually available robots roamed. I delved into Netflix, I trawled Amazon Prime and I searched Google Play to find machine-themed movies. I even paid what seemed like the price of a small house to sit through two hours and forty-three minutes of Blade Runner 2049 at the cinema – and the replicants aren’t technically robots in that. I went back to my childhood to dip into classics like Weird Science. I had great fun watching the Buffybot ‘Intervention’ episode from Buffy the Vampire Slayer again. But I very quickly discovered one thing: there is no joy to be obtained from watching films about robots when you spend your working life researching robots. It’s a busman’s holiday. My inner critic cannot disengage.

What to do? I want to be able to tell you all about that brave new cybernetic world captured in celluloid. Instead, all I have to show for my labour is a set of scribbled notes that say things like ‘happy hookerbot fail’, ‘conscious and moral’, ‘not again!’, and ‘CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE!!!’ (also underlined twice for good measure).

Fortunately, there are some dedicated people who excel at this. They have the patience, the tenacity, the insight and the skill.

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