If you’re younger than 35, you’ll probably live long enough to put David Levy’s prediction to the test. Levy says that by 2050 we’ll be creating robots so lifelike, so imbued with human-seeming intelligence and emotions, as to be nearly indistinguishable from real people. And we’ll have sex with these robots. Some of us will even marry them. And it will all be good.
Levy lays out his vision of a Brave New Carnal World in Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, which, despite its extended riffs on sex toys through the ages, is a snigger-free book. Levy’s no Al Goldstein. Rather he’s a 62-year-old British chess master turned artificial-intelligence expert persuaded that robot sex can brighten the lives of many, many unhappy people. “Great sex on tap for everyone, 24/7,” he writes on the final page of the book. What’s not to like?
“Chess” and “sex” aren’t words that normally share the same sentence, but in Levy’s case, the one led to the other. A keen chessman since boyhood, by the time he got to St. Andrews University he played at the international level. At the university he got interested in computers and the challenge of programming machines to play chess. Eventually he earned international recognition for his work on chess-playing computers and natural-language software, and in the mid ’90s headed a team that won the Loebner Prize, widely regarded as the world championship of conversational software. Today he owns a firm that develops electronic hand-held brain games.
And TEC will be the first church to perform human-robot marriages…
Instead of following the lead of #1 and coming up with yet more jokes about this topic, tempting as it is, I’ve venture a comment of a different sort. I’m a chess player myself, though not at David Levy’s high level (he’s an International Master, if I recall correctly, just short of the highest level, International Grandmaster; there are about 600+ of the latter in the world).
And because chess is my main hobby, I’m well aware of how strangely often great ability in chess has historically been linked with psychological disorders of various sorts. For example, take the two greatest American chess masters of all time, Paul Morphy (in the 1850s), and the famous Bobby Fischer (in the 1960s and early 70s). Both were supreme geniuses at chess, the very best in the world in their day. Yet both were demonstrably, certifiably insane.
No need to list other cases, but while you don’t have to be crazy to excell in chess, it apparently is no barrier to reaching the highest levels of performance in that elite mental sport. All that to say that when David Levy makes a wild prediction of this sort, it tends to suggest to me that Levy may be yet another case of this wierd and sad phenomenon.
Oh, and one more interesting fact from chess history. And that is the amazing degree to which chess has been enriched, if not even dominated, by Jewish players. With a name like Levy, it’s pretty obvious that David Levy is Jewish. And in the 20th century, roughly HALF the world’s top players were Jewish, an astounding feat. The list of immortal chess masters who were Jewish includes Akiba Rubinstein, Aaron Nimzovitch, Reuben Fine, Isaac Horowitz, Samuel Reshevsky (the only Orthodox Jew who refused to play chess on Saturdays in tournaments), and not least, former world champion, Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player of all time.
If any regular T19 readers are interested in finding a new person to match wits with over the glorious 64 squares of “the royal game,” then by all means contact me privately. I simply LOVE chess!
David Handy+
Chess enthusiast (but strictly an amateur)
To h*ll with robots, I’m waiting for some of these comic book women to be brought to life. Isn’t there some way to do that?? Seriously, speaking as a superficial male, that’s really where I feel our energy should be directed.
Charley, not so fast my friend. First there must be a period of deep listening to the experiences of our robot members.
Sex with a machine reduces sex to the mechanical. But I’m an imperfect machine. Seems to me the best way to truly great machine sex is to cut out the truly un-great machine, i.e. me. Maybe the best machine sex is between two perfect sex-machines.
This is another opportunity for us to talk about what love is. We’ve squandered too many such opportunities by agreeing with the sexologists when they say that love and sex are programmed into us. Love is not my programming; if it were, I wouldn’t need to spend so much of my energy fighting its opposite within me. Similarly, the sex that is obviously programmed into me is the kind that is merely reproductive and described by the nasty street jargon I needn’t repeat here. Great sex is not programmed into me, and it can’t be had programmatically. It hangs on love, and grace, and gift.
Tar Heel, I wonder what a Robot Pride Parade will look like…
Laocoon is largely right. Why is it that America is unable to distinguish between getting laid and making love? They are obviously of a different quality, though they use the same equipment. I suspect, however, that L has love programmed into to him/her because where, in America, would he learn the difference? The difference is really the difference bet ween the merely mechanical – drop in a seed, cover it up, wait for rain – and the agrarian – drop in the seed, cover it up, water it, tend the seedling, protect and nurture the plant, and finally harvest the fruit. In short, the agrarian is born in us – full disclosure: this is a farmer talking – as is the merely mechanical. We are distinctly human in this, that we have a choice: Do we wish the pleasure of planting the seed or the pleasure of the harvest? Larry
Odd that no has yet mentioned the studies that say married folks have the best sex! I just don’t see me establishing that deep a relationship with robots, I hardly have that deep a relationship with my car!! Will there be gay robots?
About 10% of them will be gay.
Didn’t Star Trek already do this with Data and Tasha Yar? (leading to the running gag about being “fully functional”)
A few months ago I was picking through C S Lewis’ [i]That Hideous Strength[/i], and came across the parts in which Lewis touched on the sexual practices of the inhabitants of the earthward side of the moon:
[blockquote] The Stranger mused for a few seconds; then, speaking in a slightly sing-song voice, as though he repeated on old lesson, he asked, in two Latin hexameters, the following question:
‘Who is called Sulva? What road does she walk? Why is the womb barren one one side? Where are the cold marriages?’
Ransom replied, ‘Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. She walks in the lowest sphere. The rim of the world that was wasted goes through her. Half of her orb is turned toward us and shares our curse. Her other half looks to Deep Heaven; happy would be he who could cross that frontier and see the fields on her further side. On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages are cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.’ [/blockquote]
Later, Merlin (after his introduction to Jane Studdock) is appalled at the realisation that the Studdocks have, by deliberately avoiding childbirth, failed to conceive a child whom God would have used in particularly mighty ways.
Interesting reminders of some elements of Christian tradition which we who were born in the second half of the 20th Century find so counterintuitive. Recalibration, anyone?
I intended to add, in my penultimate paragraph, that the Studdocks’ anti-conceptional practices are described as ‘the uses of Sulva’–i.e., the practices of the moon’s ‘accursed people’.
Still waiting on my flying car….
#9, Charley,
LOL. Actually, of course, that famous 10% figure that the gay community loves to throw around has long been discredited. It was based on the early Kinsey studies on sexual behavior that were NOT based on random, representative samples. For example, Alfred Kinsey relied a lot on men in prison, which really skewed his data. The most reputable and reliable sociological studies (such as the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey) reveal that the actual incidence of homosexual behavior in America is more like 2-3%.
However, it may well be rising. The lessening of social taboos has encouraged experimentation with all sorts of deviant sexual practices.
Sorry, if that’s responding way too seiously to a joke. But there are all sorts of gay propaganda-based myths out there in general circulation that need to be refuted. And one of those is that myth that up to 10% of men are gay. Just not true.
David Handy+