Love and Sex with Robots

David Levy

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061860386
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Human-Computer Interaction
• Index: Computer Science

Love, marriage, and sex with robots? Not in a million years? Maybe a whole lot sooner!

A leading expert in artificial intelligence, David Levy argues that the entities we once deemed cold and mechanical will soon become the objects of real companionship and human desire. He shows how automata have evolved and how human interactions with technology have changed over the years. Levy explores many aspects of human relationships—the reasons we fall in love, why we form emotional attachments to animals and virtual pets, and why these same attachments could extend to love for robots. Levy also examines how society's ideas about what constitutes normal sex have changed—and will continue to change—as sexual technology becomes increasingly sophisticated.

Shocking, eye-opening, provocative, and utterly convincing, Love and Sex with Robots is compelling reading for anyone with an open mind.

PART ONE

Love with Robots

We ask [of the computer] not just about where we stand in nature, but about where we stand in the world of artefact. We search for a link between who we are and what we have made, between who we are and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy with our own creations, we might become.

—Sherry Turkle, The Second Self

1 Falling in Love (with People)

Why on earth should people fall in love with robots? A very good question, and one that is central to this book. But before we can begin to answer this question, we need to examine exactly why we humans fall in love, why love develops in one person for another human being.

Since the 1980s many aspects of love have become hot research topics in psychology, but one area that has been relatively neglected by researchers is why people fall in love. Even more surprising, perhaps, is the conclusion of some recent studies that romantic love is a continuation of the process of attachment, a well-known and well-studied phenomenon in children but less studied in adults. Attachment is a feeling of affection, usually for a person but sometimes for an object or even for an institution such as a school or corporation.

Children first become attached to objects very early in their lives. Babies only a few weeks old exhibit some of the signs of attachment, initially to their mothers, and as babies grow older, the signs of attachment extend to certain objects and remain evident for several years. A baby cries for its blanket and its rattle, a toddler for its teddy bear; a primary-school child yearns for her doll. Different items become the focus of each child’s possessive attentiveness as the process continues, but with changing objects of attachment. Toys, Walkmen, computer consoles, bicycles, and almost any other possession can become the focus of the attachment process. As the child develops into a young adult who in turn develops into a more mature adult, so the process continues to hold sway, but with the object of focus generally changing to “adult toys” such as cars and computers. And, as the psychologists now tell us, attachment to people becomes evident in a different guise, as adults fall in love.

Attachment and Love

Attachment is a term in psychology most commonly used to describe the emotionally close and important relationships that people have with each other. Attachment theory was founded on the need to explain the emotional bond between mother and infant.* The British developmental psychologist John Bowlby, one of the first investigators in this field, described attachment as a behavioral system operated by infants to regulate their proximity to their primary caregivers. He explained the evolution of such a system as being essential for the survival of the infant, in view of its inability to feed itself, its very limited capacities for exploring the world around it, and its powerlessness to avoid and defend itself from danger. Bowlby also believed that the significance of attachment is not restricted to children but that it extends “from the cradle to the grave,” playing an important role in the emotional lives of adults.

Bowlby’s notion of attachment as a phenomenon that spans the entire human life span was first explored at a symposium organized by the American Psychological Association in 1976, and during the 1970s and early 1980s Bowlby’s ideas on attachment were embraced by several psychologists investigating the nature and causes of love and loneliness in adults. Some of these researchers had observed that the frequency and nature of periods of loneliness appear to be influenced by a person’s history of attachment, but until the late 1980s there was no solid theory that linked a person’s attachment history with his or her love life. Then, in 1987, Cindy Hazan and Philip Shaver suggested that romantic love is an attachment process akin to that between mother and child, a concept that they then applied successfully to the study of adult romantic relationships, with the spouse and various significant others replacing parents as the attachment figures. The principal propositions of their theory have been summarized as follows:

1. The emotional and behavioral dynamics of infant-caregiver relationships and adult romantic relationships are governed by the same biological system.
2. The kinds of individual differences observed in infant-caregiver relationships are similar to the differences observed in romantic relationships.
3. Individual differences in adult attachment behavior are reflections of the expectations and beliefs people have formed about themselves and their close relationships, on the basis of their attachment histories. These “working models” are relatively stable and, as such, may be reflections of early experiences with a caregiver.
4. Romantic love, as commonly conceived, involves the interplay of three major biological behavior systems: attachment (lovers feel a dependence on each other in a way that is similar to how a baby feels about her mother); caregiving (one lover sees the other as a child that needs to be cared for in some way); and sex (for which there is no simple parallel in attachment theory).

In practice, the similarity between infant-caregiver attachment and adult romantic attachment manifests itself principally in four different ways: Both infants and adults enjoy being in the presence of their attachment figures and seek them out to engender praise when they accomplish something or when they feel threatened; both infants and adults become distressed when separated from their attachment figures; both infants and adults regard their attachment figures as providing security for them when they feel distressed; and both infants and adults feel more comfortable when exploring new possibilities if they are doing so in the presence of, or when accessible to, their attachment figures.

Hazan and Shaver’s theory of romantic love as an attachment process contributed little to psychologists’ understanding of the role played by attachment in romantic relationships, or to how that form of attachment evolves. Shaver’s view at the time was that the process of natural selection had somehow “co-opted” the human attachment system in order to facilitate the bonding process in couples, thereby promoting feelings akin to the parental instincts that help infants to survive. But during the 1990s, researchers into the theory instead began to come to the conclusion that there exists a “modest to moderate degree of continuity in attachment style”¹ as a person ages, implying that those infants who have strong attachment bonds with their mothers are more likely to grow into adults who have strong attachment bonds with their partners. If this is indeed the case, then one’s capacity to experience romantic love would appear to depend on one’s attachment history.

Attachment to a material possession can develop into a stronger relationship as a result of the possession’s repeated use and the owner’s interaction with it. This phenomenon is known as “material possession attachment.”² The process by which this happens is similar to the way in which we develop our understanding of and feelings for people as we get to know them over time. Initially, of course, a material possession is nothing more than a commodity that is purchased and probably comes to “live” in our home. As we use it, play with it, and so forth, we get to know it, and gradually it might become less and less of a commodity, more and more a part of our life. The computer is no longer simply a computer, it quickly becomes my computer. Not so much “my” in the sense of its being owned by me, but more in the sense of its being the particular computer with which I associate myself, the one that I feel is part of my being. Computers, in fact, provide an excellent example of this interpretation of “my”—when people go into an Internet café or into the computer room at school or college, they will usually gravitate toward the same computer they have used in the past, even though all the machines in the room might be, to all practical purposes, identical. They head straight for “their” computer, the one for which they feel they have some affinity, the one with which they subconsciously feel they have already developed some sort of relationship.

As an owner uses an object and interacts with it more and more over time, so this personal attention applied to the object endows it with a special meaning for the owner. Several psychology researchers have pointed to this creation-of-meaning process, among whom Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton have been the primary advocates, referring to this special meaning as “psychic energy.” As the owner invests more psychic energy in an object, more meaning is attached to the object, it becomes more important to its owner, and the stronger is the attachment that the owner feels for the object.

The commodity thus becomes increasingly personalized to its owner through repeated use and interaction, and as it does so, it takes on, within the owner’s mind, an aura of uniqueness. Consciously the owner knows full well that his computer is more or less exactly the same as millions of other computers in the world, but subconsciously there develops in the mind of the owner the notion that this particular computer, his computer, is unique, it is personal to him. And now that the commodity is no longer viewed as a commodity but as something unique, something personalized, it becomes part of its owner’s being, “symbolizing autobiographical meanings.”³ The computer, if that is the commodity, becomes irreplaceable in the mind of its owner, even though clearly it could be replaced by another computer of the same make and model with the same amount of memory and the same operating system.* This “uniqueness” will often cause the owner to be unwilling to replace it, “even with an exact replica, because the consumer feels that the replica cannot sustain the same meaning as the original.”⁴ Such possessions thereby become endowed with personal meaning that connects the object with its owner—the object in a sense becomes part of the owner—and this personal meaning is what is called “material possession attachment.”

There are of course many reasons an owner could develop a sentimental attachment to a particular object, but these reasons normally derive from something connected with the source of the object—perhaps it was a gift from a loved one, a memento of an emotionally important event in the owner’s life, or a personal possession the owner has used caringly for several years. What is different about the nature of the possession attachment felt for a computer is the element of control—the computer is at its owner’s every beck and call. Russel Belk’s 1988 paper “Possessions and the Extended Self” discusses the notion that we are “extended” by our possessions, they become part of us, extending us, whether they be material possessions or human “possessions” such as “my” friend, “my” partner, “my” spouse; and Beck cites David McClelland’s suggestion that the greater the control we exercise over an object, the more closely allied with that object we become.

Thus, through the great measure of control we exercise over computers, we have the potential to become close to them. Because of the high level of use we make of them and the interactive nature of that use, computers have the potential to hold a special meaning for us, to strengthen the attachment we feel for them. Combine these with the potential to extend ourselves by virtue of our possessions and it is not difficult to imagine that the computer—controlled, interactive, used, and possessed—could create in us the level of attachment necessary to engender a kind of love. And if, as suggested by Frayley’s thinking, one’s capacity to experience romantic love depends on one’s attachment history, an attachment history that involved computers or electronic pets could provide a basis for the capacity to fall in love with robots.*

How Proximity and Repeated Exposure Affect Falling in Love

There have been a number of studies on the effect of proximity on attraction. In one of the earliest studies, conducted during the 1930s in Philadelphia, the addresses of marriage partners were recorded for some five thousand marriage licenses. It was found that 12 percent of the couples lived in the same building at the time they applied for a marriage license* while a further 33 percent lived within five blocks of each other. For a similar study, this one in Columbus, Ohio, during the 1950s, the investigators interviewed 431 couples and found that 54 percent of them lived sixteen blocks or less apart when they first dated, and for 37 percent of these couples the distance was five blocks or less. Surveys at MIT and the University of Michigan found similar results for couples living in student dormitories. The MIT study showed that the most important factor in creating emotionally close couples was the distance between their apartments—the closer they lived, the more likely they were to become friends, while the University of Michigan study indicated that roommates were much more likely to become close friends than were students living in different rooms several doors away from each other.

The overwhelming conclusion to be drawn from these and many similar studies is that seeing someone frequently, referred to by psychologists as “repeated exposure,” creates a much more fertile atmosphere for friendship and love than seeing someone less often, and the proximity of their living quarters clearly has a significant effect on how frequently two people meet. If two people live close to each other, they are more likely to develop a familiarity than if they live farther apart—familiarity in terms of seeing each other more, spending time with each other, thinking about each other, and anticipating interaction with each other.

It has also been shown that even without any personal contact with the other individual, repeated exposure to them generally creates a feeling of liking for them. The reason that repeated exposure appears to create such a positive effect on human attraction has been suggested by Ayala Pines to “arise out of an inborn discomfort that we all feel around strange and unfamiliar things.”⁵

In an experiment conducted by Richard Moreland and Scott Beach at the University of Pittsburgh, four women pretended to be students attending classes. The women avoided all contact with the other students in the class, and they attended different numbers of lectures: One of them attended once, another ten times, one fifteen times, and the fourth one not at all. At the end of the course, the students in the class were shown photographs of all four women and asked about their feelings and attitudes to each of them. Even though none of the students had had any personal contact with any of the four women, their reported liking of each of the women was strongly related to how often that woman had attended the class—the one who never attended was liked the least, with the level of liking rising as the number of attendances in the class rose. The study also found that the more often a woman attended the class, the more likely she was to have been described by the students as attractive, interesting, intelligent, and similar to themselves.

The common factor in the studies described above is that in each case the repeated exposure was to another person, but Robert Zajonc has shown that repeated exposure to almost anything increases our tendency to like it and that a direct correlation exists between the frequency of exposure and the level of liking. In one of his experiments, he pretended to be conducting a test of visual memory and asked his test subjects to look at photographs of different people, with each viewing lasting for thirty-five seconds. He varied the number of times each photograph was shown—some were shown once while others were shown two, five, ten, or as many as twenty-five times. Zajonc found that his subjects tended to feel more positively toward the person in a photograph if they were shown their photograph more often, indicating that the physical presence of the object of one’s affection is not a prerequisite for developing that affection. This result concurs with the phenomenon of pen pals falling in love without meeting, and also with its more recent and more prolific parallel—falling in love on the Internet.*

Why People Fall in Love

Let us n...