Kate Devlin says she does, occasionally, get a little weary of being pigeonholed as “that sex robot woman.”
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“There’s something so intrinsically human about sex, and it’s something that maps quite nicely onto AI,” Devlin told me in a recent Skype conversation from her London office. “In artificial intelligence, there’s this drive toward some kind of goal or behavior. That’s sort of like humans with their biological need to reproduce and spread our DNA.”
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[S]ex robots evolved from traditional humanoid sex dolls. The result is an abundance of hypersexual humanoids, or ones that are just plain painful to imagine putting your genitals anywhere near. We need to bring it back toward the tech, Devlin said, where there’s more abstraction, personalization, and accessibility for all.…
Sure, we could bone our personalized sexborgs of the future, but could we ever truly love them? Depends on how far into the future you’re willing to look, Devlin told me. “It might not be the same as the way we feel about other humans, but I certainly don’t think that love is something that has to be reciprocated,” she said. “People love people all the time and don’t necessarily have it returned to them.” If we’re able to feel affection for inanimate objects or even friends we met over the internet, why not a bot that hits the right spot?
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