Lit: Like a Sex Machine

Love and Sex with Robots
David Levy

By Paulette Perhach

“Great sex for everyone, 24/7.”

This is the final line and premise from David Levy in his book, “Love and Sex with Robots.” He predicts that within five years, humans will be getting lucky with robots. Forty years from now, we’ll be falling in love with them.

That’s a huge leap, but imagine if you told the people of the ‘50s that in the new millennium people would be receiving sexy photos on tiny wireless devices, robots would be vacuuming our floors, and that more than half of American women aged 25 to 35 would have a battery-operated “friend” in the bedside drawer.

You realize they’d react with the same shock, disbelief and horror that you might have when faced with the prediction that people will be sharing bank accounts with their robot wives. And you might be proved just as wrong.

Levy uses the beginning of the book to lay the first steps in the direction of a future where robots and humans are nearly interchangeable. Sections on why we love pets and why we’re emotionally attached to our iPods go so long that they leave the reader at times thinking, “When are we going to get to the hot robot-on-robot action?”

At one point the author lists the 10 causes of falling in love and asks, “Which of these reasons, if any, would not apply if the object of one’s potential love were not another human being but instead a robot?”

But no, only a crazy person would have feelings for a machine. Just like only a crazy person would curse at a frozen computer; laugh at R2-D2’s squeals; cry when thugs smashed the battery acid out of Johnny 5 with a crowbar and axe.

Oh.

It’s not enough to make you believe you’ll be taking a long walk on the beach with an mechanical Brad Pitt clone, but the book makes you see how technology has already crept into an emotional area of our lives that was before untapped by other “things.”

Levy predicts the more we work to make them like us, the more robots and technology will seep more into our world.

“They will look like humans,” he writes. “They will be more creative than the most creative of humans. They will be able to conduct conversations with us on any subject, at any desired level of intellect and knowledge, in any language, and with any desired voice.”

Even if you don’t plan on making the moves on a machine, there are still some interesting predictions on how life will be with robot lawyers, robot psychologists and, ahem, robot journalists.

The questions of whether or not we will, would or should get physical or emotional with our own mechanical creations are not concretely answered in this book for this reader. But Levy is convinced.

If Levy’s predictions become reality, it could alleviate the loneliness of the millions who, for one reason or another, would never be accepted by another person.

Robots will love unconditionally, programmed to be kind and caring to any person in need of affection. And what’s more human than that?