Artificial Desire

Manufacturing lust, love, and everything in between for those who choose to build their partners rather than find them.

A cursory search of the mighty internet will reveal that I am far from the first person to write about this topic. In fact, in addition to countless books, articles, videos (ew), video games (double-ew), and preachy religious websites, this past November even saw the First International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots featuring such panels and presentations as “robot emotions,” “intelligent sex hardware,” and my personal favourite, “teledildonics.” While there is a lot of noise, frightening imagery, and confusion around the topic, one thing that most people agree on – except the religious extremists – is that love and sex with robots will eventually be commonplace, and likely in our lifetime. Hell, even Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with an AI – though admittedly, he may not be the best example to prove my point.

Pun completely intended, there are two ways to approach this topic: top-down (love) or bottom-up (sex).

Interestingly, the first instance of the concept of robotic love actually dates back to the first ever use of the term “robot.” In Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), artificial beings revolt against their creators; the play ends with a male and female robot falling in love and inheriting the earth. However, when it comes to interspecies erotica, the first instance of human-robot love – to my knowledge – was in Lester del Rey’s 1938 short story “Helen O’Loy.” The plot tells of two young men who modify a household robot to develop emotions. Helen, the robot, falls in love with one of the men who initially resists her but ultimately marries her. They grow old together and only in the story’s finale is it revealed that both men were actually in love with her all along.

Since these early works, countless pieces have been written by sci-fi authors over the years detailing robots developing emotions and falling in love with their engineering creators or vice-versa (and yes, the engineers also had to develop emotions). One of my personal favourites is William Gibson’s Idoru, where an aging rock star falls in love with a bodiless synthetic personality (artificial intelligence) and much hilarity and drama ensues. Gibson’s novel deals with many of the major themes you would expect: ethics, social stigma, misunderstanding, peer judgment, and the belief that our rock star, Rez, has lost his mind.

David Levy, arguably the foremost authority on the topic, even wrote a practical, and disturbingly thorough book on the topic detailing the cultural history of our fascination with robots and some of the far-reaching implications. In Love and Sex with Robots, he views our potential love of robots and AI as an extension of the affection people show towards their pets, phones, vehicles, or other non-human constructs. Like Gibson, Levy naturally acknowledges that this is all a bit weird and at least initially, will come with a certain layer of social stigma and judgment. However, he draws on historical examples such as oral sex, masturbation, and homosexuality to cite instances where public perception has gradually shifted towards acceptance in the initial face of outcry.

Regardless, if we push all that dull ethics and stigma stuff to the side for a moment and run with the premise of artificial sentience – that we will one day create robots capable of emotion – then isn’t the idea of people falling in love with robots not only plausible, but pretty much inevitable? A truly sentient AI should, in theory, be indistinguishable from human intelligence and therefore, falling in love with a robot should really be no different from falling in love with a person. Even if we haven’t quite perfected the hardware, one only need to look to the wedding parties in World of Warcraft or Second Life to realize that recent tech generations aren’t too bothered by the lack of physical form.

Yet, physicality is a part of love that shouldn’t be ignored and what fun would this article be if we didn’t get a bit mechanically depraved? First, to anyone who feels as though the idea of having sex with a machine is ignoble and disgusting, I’ll only briefly point to the multi-billion dollar global vibrator industry to highlight that we as a society seem to have no qualms about fucking machines. Granted, particularly in the early, unrefined days, the experience of sex with a physical robot may be more than a touch awkward and require a stretch of the imagination. However, we human beings seem to have few limits on what we can both imagine and accomplish, particularly when it comes to matters of the bedroom.

As you might have guessed, efforts to date largely serve the male market. You may have also guessed that the current leaders in this technology are coming out of Japan. While I would love to chat design points and engineering specifications for such marvels as the AutoBlow2, Fleshlight Vstroker, Machine Gun Happiness Browser, or Fuckzilla – and yes, these all exist – I’m going to focus in on the progression of Tenga: a Japanese company trying to define the future of masturbation. Beyond simply the main cylindrical unit, which Tenga claims that their “active detailed textures” are the most advanced on the market, the system integrates a Novint Falcon to move the cylinder and help simulate motion around the tube. Moreover, they have created a cartoon-virtual environment and, using an Oculus Rift, are able to essentially immerse the user in a VR cartoon porn with them as the male co-star. I’d describe the system further, however, it’s near impossible to do knowing that my family reads these articles and there are some hilarious videos on the internet of nerds getting mechanical handjobs at tech conferences that I’d rather you see for yourself.

So this is happening already and we can assume it will only get better (worse?). In theory, there are some great benefits to the prospect of robotic sex. It would be tremendously safe from an infection standpoint (though I won’t comment on the risk of mechanical failure). It could decrease levels of prostitution in both adults and children (though the thoughts of what robotic fantasies a child molester may envision make me want to crawl out of my skin). It would reduce complications of emotion, intimacy and sexual anxiety (you’re welcome, teenage boys). And of course, since it’s all about you, robotic sex would become a veritable home run derby of orgasms (but the romantic in me does feel there is something very sad about the concept of being able to program the “perfect orgasm”).

Of course, there is a catch to our robotic lovers: babies. While many of the darkest corners of our bedrooms and minds may have forgotten that the evolutionarily intended function of sex is procreation, the fact remains: the reason you get that special feeling when you look at a swell gal or fella is, in the strictest of biological senses, because your subconscious is trying to pass on its genetic code and continue the species. Yet, until we invent artificial fallopian tubes that pop out digital ovum or robotic testes capable of mass-scale production of cyber-sperm – each of which can fuse with human gametes to create some blasphemous homo-robo zygote – we might as well be shooting our loads into a sock.

And we need only look to the declining nation of Japan to see the effects of reduced birth rate. To be fair, Japan’s lackluster interest in babies has to do with strict social codes and a backlash against traditional marriage, and not the excessive fetishisation of technology (I was as surprised as you). However, the nation is already beginning to see the effects around the country. Reports have hypothesized the disappearance of smaller towns, the shrinking of national workforce, a risk of economic collapse, and in extreme scenarios, the extinction of an entire nation and culture.

These types of impacts outline a fairly solid counterpoint to the “if it feels good, do it” argument of robo-love and suddenly make the idea of falling in love with an AI, or buying the world’s greatest sexbot seem pretty selfish – if it means potentially contributing to the downfall of mankind. I’m not about to close this article by siding with the religious extremists, but from a purely long-term economic standpoint, maybe the sexbot community needs to consider designing for artificial polygamy or robotic three-ways.

Artificial Speculation

Introduction

Scanning is a tool used in the foresight practice to uncover weak signals that herald shifts within different industries, behavioural changes, and other emerging movements that will shape the future. While this tool nets fruitful inspiration for organizations around the world, typically these exercises are limited to a few years out and within fairly targeted constraints. However, to uncover the types of signals that give way to true breakthrough, our goal must not simply be breadth of exploration, but also depth of analysis if we are to understand the driving forces of the future and the implications they will have.

The following exercise highlights my exploration to dig deep into one of my favourite topics in the world - artificial intelligence. Below, there are two case studies of an interesting concept currently seen in the world, a handful of signals that stem from the analysis of that concept and an abductive exploration of the potential implications that each signal may have in the coming years. And when we allow our minds to speculate and drift towards the possibilities of the future, each gets a little bit uncomfortable and a lot bit weird.

"Out of Our Hands"

Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab recently ran an experiment where they facilitated a conversation between two independent artificial intelligences. Chatbots are AIs designed to emulate a human conversation in the purest form possible. While not sentient entities, the intent of most chatbots is to compete in the Loebner prize – an annual competition for the most human-like AI conversation – and pass what is considered the first Turing test. The team at Cornell decided to place two of these together to see what kind of a conversation they would have. While awkward and at times downright strange and near incomprehensible, this experiment asks an important question about what happens when we take humans out of the equation of AI interaction.

Signal: The Artificial Unknown
The most obvious and prevalent signal from this experiment surrounds the idea that when we place two AIs together, all bets are off. Until we achieve true sentience in robotics, most programmers, given enough time, could perfectly map the conversation a chatbot would have with a human, based on what the person decides to say. Even the most advanced AI is still basically a complex if-this-then-that decision tree. However, chatbots are entities programmed to serve the purpose of responding to and conversing with humans. The AI can ask questions and probe, but they effectively exist to let the human guide the topic of conversation, and respond accordingly. When we put 2 chatbots together, they have nothing to talk about and it means that their conversation is going to get a bit weird.

Fast forward to the day we have passed the Turing test and our AIs have achieved sentience and the question still remains: what do they talk about? Human beings are driven by certain basic needs, emotions, and instincts that, in a very roundabout way, dictate the types of social interactions we will have. However, these basic needs for robots will be entirely different and raises a reality that two robotics interacting with each other will take their conversation into a place that we simply cannot predict.

Implications
The implications here are twofold. Aligned with Karl Schroeder’s theory of Thalience, this means that when AIs begin to interact with each other, they will develop their own paths of intelligence, social structures, languages and ways of perceiving the world. Their fundamental differences as individuals will create motivations that will uncover pieces of knowledge that humans have never even considered. This should both excite us for the possibilities to consider and understand new directions of information and knowledge and the potential to harness the intellect of these AIs for rapid technological advancement.

However, this should also frighten us. By creating a form of intelligence as smart as us and yet with fundamentally different motivations, we launch ourselves into a strange direction where we have effectively created a type of alien species that will force us to rethink how we live as people in order to find a way to mutually coexist…or not.

Signal: Robotic Social Ladder
A knock-on effect of these unknown interactions is how social structures and hierarchies will form within the robotic community. Undoubtedly, we will program robots to be courteous and polite to humans (and they will be, at least initially), however, when two AIs interact, what will be the social norm for robotic conversation? Much in the same way that human beings posture and position for rank within social circles, will robots house the same insecurities, envy and lust for power that pushes them to be constantly battling for the alpha position? Moreover, where compassion and empathy prevent most humans from being maniacal sociopaths, what piece of artificial programming will prevent robots from turning into mechanical death-bots, at least towards each other? Asimov’s first law protects humans and third law protects the individual robot, but where is the fourth law precluding mass-scale robocide? Alternatively, could the foundational pieces of robotic AI turn them all into chill, peace-loving hippybots? Could the reality be far less exciting and simply dictate dull, cold, and calculated interactions between these mechanical beings?

Implications
The real point implied above is that in creating artificial intelligence, we are also creating an “artificial society.” However, as opposed to contrasting this society to the differences between the American and Japanese ways of living, the differences between ours and a robotic society may be more drastic and akin to that of another species. In much the same way that our society has created institutions of education, correction and indoctrination, a robotic society will likely also need to create a separate set of institutions to normalize and coordinate behavior. Robots of the future may need their own schools, jails, workplaces, hospitals, and entertainment forms to meet the unique needs of what is essentially another species. Yet, even typing these words draws up immediate and frightening images of segregation, class wars and tiered citizenship. It begs the question of our own society: how do we deal with the emerging sociological differences and needs of people without segregating them and forming blatant tiers of social existence?

Signal: Do Robots Believe in Electric Gods?
There is a particularly awkward moment in the video of the experiment performed by Cornell when the two chatbots stumble onto the conversation of God. When asked, “What is God to you?” one chatbot replies, “not everything.” Meanwhile, when asked if they believed in God, the other chatbot states, “Yes I do.” This innocent exchange begs a much broader question about what God is to a robot. Should humans be considered as Gods since we created robots? Does this mean that a robotic atheist doesn't believe in humans? Alternatively, would robots align with different human deities, or potentially create their own electric God to worship? Could humans ever switch faith to the electric deity, or would we all accept it as complete rubbish?

Implications
The creation of robotic sentience, and in turn, artificial faith, would force us to question our own faith and belief systems. If robots viewed us as Gods for creating them, religious sects of the world should have a moral obligation to destroy them all since their very creation would be an affront to God. If alternatively, robots created their own God, could we truly view this God as any less plausible or legitimate than Christ, Allah, Yahweh, or Brahma? Could we deny robots their faith or would we have to embrace this digideity with the same tolerance we offer religions of the world (which granted, may not be much).

Or would faith be a purely human idea? In the creation of a true artificial intelligence, would we learn something of ourselves and how we differ from other forms of intelligence in the world? We would have a being of comparable intelligence to contrast ourselves to and understand what faith even means to us – whether it is a positive, beautiful thing, or a weak, compensatory crutch.

“Mirror Mirror on the Wall”

The Social Robotics Lab at Yale University has a long-standing project looking into the cognitive and behavioral development of people through studying artificial intelligence. Nico is a humanoid robot with heavy visual modules and a whole lot of processing power that recently did something amazing: it recognized itself in a mirror. While seemingly a minor accomplishment that could be achieved through a bit of programming trickery, this paves a much larger path for artificial cognition when we consider how few species can accomplish this task (the Great Apes, dolphins, killer whales, elephants and apparently, magpies). While Nico’s accomplishment may be one of self-recognition as opposed to self-awareness, Nico has still been able to connect together a basic feedback recognizing changes in motion in a mirror as being directly correlated to its own actions. It gets that it’s a reflection.

Signal: Deconstructing Selfhood
The obvious progression of this field of study will jump from self-recognition to self-awareness. Upon an AI achieving self-awareness, this immediately calls into question the nature around and definition of “self.” While theorized and lamented for decades by Science Fiction’s greatest, we still haven’t come to full terms of what a fully self-aware AI means. An artificially sentient being brings into question everything we know about life, the mind, and how we understand our existence. It follows that if we can create a sentient AI from a bottom-up approach, then our own minds can be deconstructed into their most basic elements and rebuilt from scratch. Uncovering artificial intelligence means that we must simultaneously unlock the basic building blocks of biological intelligence. It means that the human brain should no longer hold any secrets.

Implications
Perhaps the most exciting implication of this realization is that sentient artificial intelligence should, in theory, mark the end of death. If we understand the human mind well enough to replicate it as a new, sentient being, then we should also be able to make copies of existing minds. This means that while our bodies may die, our consciousness should be able to live forever, whether by transferring into new vessels as we wear out the old, or by floating around in the digital world. It means that we will have achieved a sort of “digital transcendence” whereby our very being can be uploaded out of the human world and into the digital world, to continue living, learning, and growing.

In addition, this technology would enable us to create unlimited copies of our own intellect; a sort of “mind clone.” Whether or not we give these clones bodies, a person could theoretically have countless versions of themselves floating around in the world, each creating a slightly different variation of the original through the experiences and interactions they have. We could have conversations with ourselves, collaborate and create with ourselves through a sort of out-of-body multiple personality disorder, and in even love ourselves in a way never before possible.

Or, if none of this holds true, then at very minimum, we will have near-irrefutable evidence of the existence of the human soul.

Signal: Biomimetic Copycats
The other signal present in the work around Nico is a look in the mirror back at humanity and how we approach the world. Nico, like 99% of the robots in the world, has been biologically inspired by the cognitive development of human beings in order to build up and construct an artificial intelligence in our own likeness. Nearly all robots pay homage to some form of biomimetics, whether of people or other species. Even the historical development of artificial intelligence has followed a path similar to that of infants in terms of cognitive growth. We appear to be obsessed with ourselves and the natural world around us to the point where we cannot think and explore beyond these limitations.

Implications
This means that we’re simply not all that creative. Most of us are unable to think of anything truly innovative and, at the end of the day, just keep on trying to copy and improve on the biological workings of nature. Not just in the field of robotics, but observing most of the technology in our lives, it becomes clear that most is just a clever copy of animal physiology. Motors are muscles, pumps are hearts, cameras are eyes, microphones are ears, speakers are vocal chords, and computers are brains. No matter how creative and great we think we are, we’re still playing a game of catch-up with Mother Nature.

However, this implication comes with an opportunity. It means that our technological development has a blind spot, or a giant whitespace. It means that if you can be individual or organization to push the boundaries of thinking and development outside of our understanding of the animal body, there is a chance that you could stumble across an entire new world of robotics and technology. This is no small task and certainly not one that will be accomplished in this article, however, the potential payoff is huge.

Paging Doctor R2

Co-Authored by Paul Hartley

It is undeniable that technology-enabled devices have had a great impact upon our ability to diagnose, treat and care for the sick and infirm. However, we must be cautious to not get caught up in the flashing lights, bells, whistles and web-integrated gadgetry of it all. Many people have a dangerous penchant for placing unwavering faith in technology and, in the case of medical devices, this kind of blind trust can lead to great harm. At times, it is crucial to ground our confidence in technology to remind us – particularly in a field so vital to us as health – what these devices are and are not capable of.

What can technology do?

Fundamentally, any piece of technology is created to accomplish a particular task that, given unlimited time and resources, a human could accomplish. The most important thing we gain from assigning work to a device is speed—a machine can simply do many things faster that we can. However, beyond speed, we also gain a way to reliably do a task over and over again. Repeatability, or the successful execution of the same task, is the other major benefit of technology integration.

However, there is an important differentiation between what technology can do and how we use it. What something does is defined by the target goal inherent to the task it has been created to accomplish – in the case of most health technologies: increase speed and repeatability. What we use the technology for is a broader matter pertaining to how the technology integrates and plays a role in a much larger diagnostic process. In the case of health and medicine, technology use can be seen as falling into a number of high-level categories:

• Expand The Senses: An augmentation or enhancement of basic human senses to allow for more detailed, thorough or less harmful inspection of the human body.
• Communicate Information: Methods for transferring information quickly and seamlessly between points to allow for remote patient diagnosis, collaborative analysis and multi-device clustering.
• Redistribute Responsibility: Shifting medical actions between doctor, patient and device to increase control of the process by the patient and free up valuable time of medical professionals.
• Accurate, Consistent Data Collection: The tracking of reliable data at regular intervals to improve the quantity and quality of information used in the input of diagnosis, ensuring a better picture of an individual’s health.
• Data Analysis & Prediction: Processing large amounts of aggregate health data across multiple users to spot trends and patterns within large populations and improve the accuracy of personalized diagnoses.
• Active Intervention & Treatment: Integrated with data collection and analysis, these technologies play an active hand in treating and influencing the human body through continuous feedback loops.

What can’t technology do…yet?

Yet as powerful as the technologies that live in the above list are, it is essential to understand the limitations of our current technology for two key reasons.

First, we must understand the limits of the trust we should currently place in medical devices. Just because we are capable of creating technology that can perform a task does not always mean that we should. Creating technology for technology’s sake may be well and good in the realm of gadgets and games, however, with a subject as critical as medicine, we must ensure that our technology solution is truly superior to old ways and does not create more problems than it solves.

Second, it is essential to understand the limitations of our technology so that we know where to go next. Without knowing what stands in our way, we will never know how to get around it. As it stands, here are what we see as three of the greatest challenges we must overcome to push the envelope of medical technology:

Adaptation to Unique Scenarios: Current technology is effective because it is usually designed to do one or two things: search for patterns and give basic responses. This is a very binary approach to technology that works for our current state of technological infancy. To progress to a state where our devices can adapt to unique scenarios and deal with outliers in addition to the mainstream, we need two key things: smarter AI and more data. As software intelligence grows in complexity, it will learn to decipher more difficult problems, but in order to learn, this AI will need vast amounts of data to build an understanding of the different scenarios it could encounter in order to interpolate and extrapolate upon existing knowledge and deal with each unique case.

Holistic, Integrated Bodily Monitoring: Part of treating each unique case will come down to recognizing that the human body can not be treated in isolation. It is a vast, interconnected system and for devices to improve diagnosis and treatment, they must understand a holistic view of who we are. In addition to preventing catastrophes due to unwanted side-effects of certain treatments, collecting more data points on our bodies on a consistent basis will provide insights into the body that have never been seen in the medical community. To reach this state, we need a simultaneous improvement in our sensing, communication and multi-variable analysis capabilities.

Emotions and the Mind: Perhaps the holy grail of holistic monitoring would be to access the knowledge and mysteries stored in the human mind. Generations of medical professionals, philosophers and leaders have alluded to the interconnectedness of body and mind. As such, if we aspire to create a robotic doctor, we first need to have the technological capability to analyze and understand the human body as well as the mind. Interestingly, this is less a technology problem and more concern of psychology and biology. Our current understanding of the human brain is juvenile in the grand scheme of its complexity and many of our current remedies for ailments of the mind are based theories, intuitions and an intangible human connection. Before we can hand such great responsibility to a machine, we must be certain in our comprehension of the mind and leave nothing to guesswork. While we have no doubt that artificial intelligence will one day achieve sentience, we question whether a robot will ever be able to develop a gut; hunches and intuitions simply don’t mesh well with circuits.

Robots Control Your Mind

It’s a classic theme used in fiction: sci-fi writers and filmmakers create a dystopian future where robots use twisted logic around Asimov’s seminal 3 laws to decide that humanity can’t protect itself and therefore, must be imprisoned and controlled (I’ll admit, a bit of a stretch). Humanity, in its ever-present struggle for laziness and infinite-sigma efficiency, will go to lengths so extreme as to create an artificial consciousness that will one day overthrow us all. Sure, it seems like the stuff of…well, sci-fi…however, an even greater stretch is my argument that even without achieving the nirvana of robotic artificial intelligence, robots may already control the way we eat, sleep, work and generally, live.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me first preface these crooked words. As an undergraduate engineer, I lucked upon the opportunity of a lifetime. During my degree I worked part time and summers at McGill University’s Ambulatory Robotics lab: one of the world’s leading labs in the robotics movement of the early 2000s. While I went into the role thinking I would spend my days playing with strange, futuristic toys (I did), the lab and the people around me made me realize that robotics was about so much more. Robots had already become pervasive in our society to the point that individuals barely acknowledged them as robots. A microwave, a thermostat, ATMs, RC toys, pacemakers, coffeemakers – all are examples of robots: machines capable of carrying out multi-stage actions autonomously.

And while a far cry from padded-room imprisonment, in many ways, robotic technology has already drastically altered the way we live our lives. Some of these alterations have been improvements in efficiency, increases in public safety or departures from menial, pointless tasks. However, in losing many of these traditional touch points, so have we evolved as a species and lost pieces of ourselves. We have allowed robots in all shapes and sizes to define some very integral elements of our lives and in doing so, removed much of our own ability to take care of ourselves.

Whereas once, we were a society of people who slept and woke by the sun, accurate telling of time and perhaps the most vile of technology’s satanic spawn – the alarm clock – changed our sleep patterns, and more importantly, set the tone for a culture driven by hyper efficiency and to-the-second timing. First thing each morning, we allow a small machine to scream at us until we begin our day and in doing so, lock ourselves into an unnatural state of existence; living by the artificial construct of the 24hr clock instead of the age-old guide, the sun. We wake ourselves when we’re still tired and we sleep in when we don’t need to knowing that we have a “few more minutes.” This practice was found so unnatural that it even facilitated another key invention in the digital time-keeping era: the snooze button.

Within the workforce, robots have been changing our social structures, economic behaviors and primary tasks for nearly 100 years. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution and assembly line manufacturing, business has strived to algorithmise operations, remove inefficiency and where possible, take human interaction completely out of the equation. The impact of robotics in the business world is impossible to ignore and has caused a rapid acceleration in the evolution of job functions, particularly in western nations. Our great-grandparents were primarily tradesmen, our grandparents began to explore greater entrepreneurialism, our parents became office managers and our generation has become an army of digital workers. Robots are slowly but surely heralding the death of the blue collar.

But should we be concerned by any of this? As I described before, the process is an evolution – one where “fittest” is defined not by survival but instead by task automation. We are changing as a society and while elements of this change are undeniably unnatural, human beings have adapted to worse and will continue to adapt. We will continue to distance ourselves further from skilled labor, connection to the earth and the humility of working with our hands. However, only time will tell the true impact that this will have of the human body, mind and soul.

Just remember, Will Smith won’t always be around to save us.