Introduction: The Politics of Dissociation

I suspect the main unspoken reason behind the campaign is to maintain the present balance of power between the two sexes. Since the male libido is higher, this unevenness creates a market for gender-based relations: men will pay (money, or other forms of resources - time with child, family, hours worked, etc.) for something that they want, i.e., sex.

Message sent to the Campaign Against 'Sex' Robots

Introduction

This book was contracted in 2018, but what with one thing and another it has been waylaid. It has been difficult to write and finish because its subject matter is love. I felt myself gripped with anxiety each time I took to the keyboard and spent many thousands of hours contemplating how to present the themes. Seriously, how could I write about love when there is so much brutality in the world? 'Hell is other people', so the saying goes, as demonstrated in the play Huis Clos [No Exit], written by French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre 1989: 45). While there is some debate about the true meaning of this expression, it is regarded as a comment on the difficulties of living with people. Even in these pages you will find difficult stories to read, as I will refer to the horrors inflicted on humans and non-human animals, often done in the name of science, progress and freedom. Added to this are the ordinary cruelties that people inflict on each other in their day-to-day lives - deceit, bullying, cheating and violence. Considering all this, who wouldn't want a 'sex' robot? A kind of lookalike human without the drama! A lifelike simulation that you could program to love and care for you. An anthropomorphic machine to honour and be devoted to you, responding to your every whim and vulnerability without criticism or judgement. Yet, as I will explore in these pages, robots are not the answer to our woes as a species, but a Trojan horse. The Trojan horse myth is found in the epic poem the Odyssey by the Greek poet Homer. It tells of warring parties, engaged in a long and bloody battle at the gates of the city of Troy over a queen called Helen who was taken to Troy from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. It's a very long story (thus the 'epic'!), so I'll get to the point. The Greeks, stuck in stalemate with the Trojans, constructed a hollow wooden horse and gifted it to them as an offering to their cherished goddess Athena. The Trojans accepted the horse and brought it inside their protective and secure city gates, not knowing that Greeks were hidden inside. As night fell, soldiers emerged from the horse, tore down their enemies' defences, carried out pillage and slaughter, and subsequently won the war against the Trojans. Ironically, Trojan is also the name given to a computer virus that damages hardware and software or steals personal information. It is also that of a brand of condoms. The story is a metaphor for the danger of accepting offerings and gifts. These might seem wonderful on the surface, but ultimately they may bring doom and annihilation. I want to argue that 'sex' robots and their adjacent versions (companion robots, AI girlfriends, 'sex' dolls) are our time's Trojan horse, a 'gift' that will cause irrevocable harm to human beings and signify the end of love. This trajectory, if followed, will destroy the conditions necessary for the potential of love to thrive and be a transformative and guiding light for humanity.

While robots of women have been featured as hypersexualized in films from The Stepford Wives (1975) to Ex Machina (2014), the ownership of something approximate to a 3D 'sex' robot is a relatively new phenomenon. In fact, at the time of writing, there are hardly any 'sex' robots commercially available. But bear with me because it's still important we have this conversation about them and make sense of what is happening in our society to our relational ideas about love and sex. There's no point developing responses to problems when the horse has bolted from the stables. One way to make sense of the new ownership model in its nascent and developing form of 'sex' robots (and adjacent technologies) is to understand men's use of 'sex' dolls.

From the mid-1990s, RealDoll, a US-based company, led the way in making life-sized, hyperrealistic dolls of women for men. The company's dolls were made famous by the film Lars and the Real Girl (2007). This story is described as a 'comedy, drama, romance'. Lars Lindstrom, played by Ryan Gosling, is a socially awkward male (probably on the autism spectrum) who buys a hyperrealistic 'sex' doll and passes it off as his girlfriend to his friends, family and co-workers. Notably, his community participates in this fiction that he has created by accepting the doll. The narrative is deliberately intended to stir our sympathy for Lars, who is portrayed as lonely and unable to function comfortably in social and intimate relationships. It does not portray him as a sexual fetishist, or as a sexist male, but as a warm-hearted lost soul that needs companionship and unable to receive it from women. I remember watching the film and feeling sorry for the protagonist, and even thinking the doll in the form of a woman was better than nothing and even harmless. This perception is shared by many people, seeing these anthropomorphic products as benign. Such humanlike replicas, after all, are things that do not possess consciousness, reason or vulnerability. I want to persuade you that this is not the case, not for the robots - as things, they are not alive, conscious or sentient, however much their manufacturers try to persuade us otherwise. But they are harmful to us, and corrosive to the fabric of our sociality. If anything, and in retrospect, the film's themes were warming us up for new forms of masculine ownership and power over women.

From Metropolis to the Campaign Against 'Sex' Robots

The shift to thinking about robots and AI entities as relational others began, in part, in the labs, classrooms and lecture theatres at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States. While these trends were occurring elsewhere (particularly in Japan), it was at MIT that arguably a critical mass of researchers, centred round this university, was immersed in exactly this topic. MIT also had an advantage as a well-funded institution, deriving significant grants for robotics and AI from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and private corporations. Some of the cute-looking robots, such as Kismet, famed as one of the world's first sociable robots (Breazeal 2002), received funding from DARPA, demonstrating the interconnections between technology and US militarism. I went there as part of my doctoral fieldwork in social anthropology in the early 2000s to study the making of robots.

But my interest in robots had begun much earlier when I was a teenager engaged in left-wing politics. One of my favourite movies was Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), which I watched several times as a young political activist. I connected with its themes and concerns about working-class exploitation and dehumanization. The film features downtrodden workers and privileged elites. The wizard Rotwang takes a woman's essence and fuses it with a machine to create what he ironically calls a 'Machine-Man', as translated in the film's English subtitles. He declares heroically to the wealthy capitalist Joh Fredersen, raising his artificial hand, 'Isn't it worth the loss of a hand to have created the man of the future, the Machine-Man?!' (Metropolis 1927: 42-4), even though the robot in fact has a female form. Seeing woman as a subcategory of man, an artefact he has created, is as old as history. As an aside, the word 'robot' had been invented five years earlier in the play R.U.R. [Rossum's Universal Robots] (Capek 1923 [1920]), but the term did not make its way into the film (it is a silent film, set to music).

Despite my concerns about working-class people's dehumanization at the hands of modern production practices, I was also one of those who believed in the unlimited potential of technology to rid the world of all its ills. Robots were part of this story of human liberation - humans who created robots would free people from menial tasks, so those humans could become poets, painters and scientists. Ah, youth!!! Hence my interest in robotics was underscored by politics, rather than science-fiction films such as Star Wars or 2001: A Space Odyssey, which were often cited in the genre that sparked the interests of those I met at MIT and elsewhere.

In the early 2000s, when preparing my work for the lab, I knew they were making anthropomorphic robots. I assumed, wrongly, they were designing robots to make work lighter so humans could be free. They were in fact making robots to be 'socially interactive' and 'companions'. The recognition of this shocks me now as much as then, and machines replacing relational roles is something that has preoccupied me for over twenty years since.

When I returned to the University of Cambridge, I knew I had to write about these themes for my PhD. What I had observed while at MIT was still a marginal activity - very few people there were talking about 'sex', 'companions' and...