Changing the Story of Human-Machine Relationships

Dr Genevieve Liveley, Department of Classics and Ancient History

In Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”, she invited us optimistically to imagine “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with ... machines.”[1] The “kinships” and relationships between humans and machines that most interest Haraway here are those that involve social and quasi-familial interactions. However, these are not the kinds of relationships between humans and machines that have really seized the cultural imagination and carried forward into popular twenty-first century visions of our sociotechnical future. Despite significant advances being made in domain of carer robots, the human-machine relationships that have come to dominate the public discourse on this topic are predominantly – and pruriently – sexual. The machines that are supposed to share our future social and bodily realities are not Haraway’s cyborgs but sex robots or “sexbots”. How is this popular configuration of the human-machine relationship as socio-sexual influencing current discourse and debate – and should we be concerned about sexbot stories shaping the narrative on this subject?      

 A plethora of stories in contemporary film, television, and news media all advertise the coming of the “sexbot”. Guardian journalists have predicted that “the future of sex … is in robotics”.[2] And Vanity Fair has heralded the “Dawn of the Sex Bots” in its profile of RealDoll (“the Rolls-Royce of sex dolls”). [3] Popular cinematic fictions such as Lars and the Real Girl, Her, and Ex Machina, or TV series such as Humans and Westworld, imagine storyworlds in which human-machine interactions play out with dramatically dystopian results. Academic work published on the ethical, legal, and socio-economic issues of robotics, machine ethics, and AI in recent years tell similar tales – especially those under such headings as: “Robotic Rape and Robotic Child Sexual Abuse”, “Doom Scenarios”, and “Dystopian Futures” involving not only sex robots but companion and care robots too.[4]

 Prominent among those who, on the other hand, welcome the acceleration of sex robot technology is David Levy, whose best-selling book, Love & Sex with Robots, imagines a distinctly utopian future for sexual human-machine relationships. Levy predicts that the lonely and the bereaved especially will benefit, and that “many who would otherwise have become social misfits, social outcasts, or even worse, will instead be better-balanced human beings”.[5] In Levy’s robo-utopia, prostitution, sex-crimes and loneliness will be consigned to history:[6] “The world will be a much happier place because all those people who are now miserable will suddenly have someone. I think that will be a terrific service to mankind,” he says.

 Although credible research validating the actual benefits of sexual human-robot relationships has yet to be produced, Levy’s utopian vision finds some purchase in the self-reporting and marketing of both “realistic” sex dolls and their robotic counterparts. The “corporate narratives” put out by Abyss Creations, the designers and makers of “RealDolls”, report that their products have been purchased by a nursing association, cancer survivors, burn victims, and those with disabilities; they also claim that psychiatrists use their dolls in therapeutic treatment settings and that parents buy them for use by their autistic or socially excluded adult children.[7] Indeed, one of the perceived advantages of the sex robot in these contexts is that it notionally replaces the role of the human sex worker, potentially limiting some of the social, ethical, and physical harms associated with sex work.[8]

 However, emerging research is questioning these narratives and other claims being made for the social benefits of sex robots, instead raising concerns regarding the risks of “misogynistic objectification ... promoting the pervasive idea that living women too are sex objects that should be constantly available.”[9] Co-founder of the Campaign Against Sex Robots, Kathleen Richardson, also thinks Levy et al. overstate the benefits and understate the harms of human-robot relationships, suggesting that the utopian future promised is more of a dystopian fantasy.[10]  “Paedophiles, rapists, people who can’t make human connections – they need therapy, not dolls,” Richardson argues.[11] She also takes issue with the gendered and misogynistic narrative that the vision of a future sociotechnical robo-utopia assumes. Richardson suggests that “human lifeworlds of gender and sexuality are inflected in the making of sex robots, and ... these robots will contribute to gendered inequalities found in the sex industry” too.[12] Richardson and other supporters of the Campaign Against Sex Robots therefore argue that we need to question and change this narrative – both in our “lifeworlds” and in the “storyworlds” that help shape them.[13]

 In her most recent work, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway similarly argues not only for the importance of new ways of storytelling in shaping a posthuman world, but also for a new mode of posthuman storytelling that is less polarizing, “less binary”.[14] We need, she stresses, “to change the story, to learn somehow to narrate – to think” differently.[15] Although she does not make this argument explicit in Staying with the Trouble, Haraway intuits here that the “livingworld” is programmed by the “storyworld”.[16] And that it makes a world of difference in both cases not only what kinds of stories we tell but the way(s) in which we tell them. For, as Jerome Bruner puts it in his ground-breaking work on the narrative construction of reality, “narrative organizes the structure of human experience ... ‘life’ comes to imitate ‘art’ and vice versa”.[17]

 How we relate to sex robots (and how we manage other human-machine relationships) in the future will be coded by what we relate – by the stories we tell ourselves about our own possible worlds and our own possible sociotechnical futures. Our narratives then, have a crucial part to play in shaping representations and perceptions if we are to realise a future of human and machine relations that is not restricted by the on/off binaries of utopian and dystopian thinking. We need to change the story, to learn somehow to narrate and to think differently.

1] Haraway 1991, 154.

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/13/sex-love-and-robots-the-end-of-intimacy

[3] http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/04/sexbots-realdoll-sex-toys

[4] See Danaher 2017; Coeckelbergh 2016; Sparrow 2015; Leveringhaus 2016; Müller 2016.

[5] Levy 2007a, 304.

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/sep/16/sex-robots-david-levy-loebner

[7] http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/04/sexbots-realdoll-sex-toys

[8] Kloer 2010. See also Levy 2012 and 2007b on the prospect of “Robot prostitutes as alternatives to human sex workers.”

[9] Cox-George and Bewley 2018, 161.

[10] https://campaignagainstsexrobots.org/about/. See also Richardson 2015.

[11] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/13/sex-love-and-robots-the-end-of-intimacy

[12] Richardson 2015, 292.

[13] In response to a report published in 2017 by the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, Richardson has again maintained that “Sex robots are just another type of pornography” and as such will only serve to “increase social isolation” (BBC5.07.17): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40428976

[14] Haraway 2016, 43.

[15] Haraway 2016, 31. See also 2016, 40: “we must change the story; the story must change”.

[16] Kathleen Richardson’s 2015 Anthropology of Robots and AI forwards the same fundamental argument. See Richardson 2015, 1 for the thesis that “Whether you look to the past of robots or the present ... we take our cultural and technological models of robots from fictions ... Multiple tides flow from fictions to living practices of technoscience.”

[17] Bruner 1991, 121. 

Cited works:

Bruner, J. (1991). The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical inquiry 18(1): 1–21.

Coeckelbergh, M. (2016). Care Robots and the Future of ICT-Mediated Elderly Care: A Response to Doom Scenarios. AI and Society 31 (4): 455-462. 

Cox-George, C., and Bewley, S. (2018). I, Sex Robot: The Health Implications of the Sex Robot Industry. BMJ Sex Reprod Health 44: 161-164.

Danaher, J. (2017). Robotic Rape and Robotic Child Sexual Abuse: Should They Be Criminalised? Criminal Law and Philosophy 11 (1): 71-95.

Haraway, D. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist - Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In: D. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: 149-181.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. London.

Haraway, D. and Goodeve, T. (2000). How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Donna Haraway. London.

Kleeman, J. (2017). The Race to Build the World’s First Sex Robot. In: The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/27/race-to-build-worldfirst-sex-robot

Kloer, A. (2010). Are Robots the Future of Prostitution? http://www.pinoyexchange.com/forums/showthread.php?t=442361).

Leveringhaus, A. (2016). Against Sex Robots What's So Bad About Killer Robots? Journal of Applied Philosophy 33 (4).

Levy, D. (2007a). Love and Sex with Robots. New York.

Levy, D. (2007b). Robot Prostitutes as Alternatives to Human Sex Workers. In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Rome. (http://www.roboethics.org/icra2007/contributions/LEVY%20Robot%20Prostitutes%20as%20Alternatives%20to%20Human%20Sex%20Workers.pdf).

Levy, D. (2012). The Ethics of Robot Prostitutes. In: Lin, P., Abney, K., and Bekey, G., eds., Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics. Cambridge, MA, 223-232.

Müller , V. C. (2016). Autonomous Killer Robots Are Probably Good News. In: E. Di Nucci and F. Santonio de Sio, eds., Drones and Responsibility: Legal, Philosophical and Socio-Technical Perspectives on the Use of Remotely Controlled Weapons. Ashgate, 67-81.

Owsianik, J. (2017) State of Sex Robots: These are the Companies Developing Robotic Lovers. https://futureofsex.net/robots/state-sex-robots-companies-developing-robotic-lovers/.

Richardson, K. (2015). An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines. London.

Sparrow, R. (2015). Robots in Aged Care: A Dystopian Future? AI and Society 31 (4): 1-10.