Computer Love

I was doing research for a SciFi script when I saw this title online and reserved it at the local library. The author is David Levy, an International Master at chess who has also been involved with Artificial Intelligence for some time (largely in the context of computerized chess).  The hypothesis of the book is that within 50 years or less, there will be humans marrying androids, and human-robot relationships of a variety of sorts will become ever more widely accepted.

The book is in two parts -- the first about love, the second about sex. Each one starts with an analysis of the current understanding of how the respective phenomenon works for humans -- why and how people love, and why and how people have sex.

In the case of love, he shows how the attachment phenomenon is clearly carried over to non-human entities like people's pets, and can also be found with respect to inanimate objects -- think a fancy car, or the way Apple fans love their macbooks, ipods, or iphones. It also talks about the importance of robots simulating human appearance for more complete acceptance, and covers many recent developments in the state of android technology.

In the case of sex, Levy covers how it can be separated from love (specifically in the case of people paying for sex), and also does an extensive (maybe unnecessarily so) survey of sex "technologies" from the nineteenth century to modern-day cybersex with teledildonics.

Levy makes his case quite well that both the technology and the motivation will be there for human-android relationships to be taking place much sooner than many people would anticipate. However, he touches very little on the relatively slow pace of societal acceptance -- it is undoubted that many groups will be strongly opposed to such a development, either on the religious grounds that it is an abomination, or the anti-technology grounds that it is a symptom of a greater illness as we lose our ability to connect with other humans and begin having relationships with computers. Levy also spends hardly any time discussing question of at what point do these androids, who would at some point be indistinguishable from, or in many respects superior to, humans, be considered "alive", separately intelligent, and deserving of civil rights on their own? At what point will it be unethical to keep them in the service of their creator? I don't get the sense that Levy is unaware of these issues -- only that they're not really within the scope of what he wants to prove or elaborate on in this text -- but I would have appreciated a few more pages on this as opposed to the extensive discussion on the variety of genital-stimulating paraphenelia and humanlike dolls.

Overall, however, Love + Sex with Robots was a quick and informative read that broadened my knowledge of the current and possible future developments in humanlike robots and their ability to serve as true companions for people.