Today’s sex robots are so rudimentary that they are essentially unusable. But as sex-robot enthusiasts are quick to point out, the shoebox-sized cellphones of the 1970s were nearly useless—but they were the first prototypes for today’s ubiquitous smartphones. Eventually, sex robots will have reasonably humanlike facial expressions, limb movements, voices and even odors. The futurist Stowe Boyd has predicted that by 2025, “robotic sex partners will be…commonplace, although the source of scorn and division.”
I’m skeptical. Even by 2025 it seems unlikely that sex robots will have much appeal for male or female users. The reason is that simulating human interaction for such a multisensory experience as sex is a very complex engineering problem. Our brains have evolved to be very good at picking up on tiny social cues, like the direction of another’s gaze, the social intent of a brief touch or the shadings of vocal tone. In this interpersonal domain, we’re not so easily tricked.
Though the engineering challenges of simulating human sexual interaction are difficult, there’s no reason to believe that they are impossible to solve. Sex that entirely lacks human feeling and attachment may sound unappealing or even repugnant to many people, but at some point in the future, sex robots will become viable. A central question is whether that arc of progress will take so long that they will be leapfrogged by a different technology: neural virtual reality.
Rather than activating the body’s senses naturally, like a sex robot would, neural virtual reality simulates experience by artificially activating nerve cells. Until recently, the most common way to do this involved sticking an electrode (a thin metal needle) into tissue and passing electrical current to activate neurons at the tip. For example, if I were to stick an electrode into a sensory nerve in your arm, I could activate a single nerve fiber that might give you the sensation of vibration in a patch of skin on your palm.
More recently, scientists have developed a new and improved way to activate neurons. First, using genetic engineering, they create a virus that can only infect certain cell types (like the nerve cells with endings in the skin that respond to caresses). When the virus infects the target cell, it commands that neuron to produce a protein that sends out an electrical signal only when activated by blue light. Then, if someone shines a blue light on your skin, you will feel a caress. That perceived caress could be modified by flashing the blue light in different patterns all over the body. The sex robot of the future may well be a catsuit with inward-facing flashing blue LEDs embedded in it, linked via Bluetooth to an app on your phone. The sexual application of this technique, called optogenetics, could be just decades away.
by David Linden, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
