Millennials are killing everything Baby Boomers hold dear. Golf. Breakfast cereal. Diamonds. Casual dining chain restaurants. And now, human relationships.
The lag between a technology’s invention and it being inevitably co-opted for sex seems to be growing smaller. There was 118 years between the building of the Eiffel Tower and a woman marrying it. Porn on the internet predates the World Wide Web (though the world’s first computer art was a pin-up girl) but it didn’t boom until the Nineties, twenty years after it came online as ARPANET. We haven’t even managed to create artificial intelligence that will pass the Turing Test, and people are already eschewing human partners for virtual girlfriends.
Sexy robots — almost exclusively buxom, plasticine females, dubbed gynoids — have been a trope since their invention. Star Trek eventually bowed to it, following Patrick Stewart’s Locutus of Borg with the more conventionally-appealing cyborg Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan). Austin Powers has an army of villainous Sixties-bombshell Fembots. Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis features a virgin/whore dichotomy with one of the first robots ever depicted on screen, played by a teenaged Brigitte Helm. And there’s the Westworld series (2016).
(Metropolis’ robot played by Brigitte Helm)
There have always been people more interested in sex with train stations, cars or trees than people, but it has only been since the rise of the smartphone, the adequately-intelligent chatbot and the sufficiently-realistic sex doll that the prospect of a robot or virtual girlfriend left the realm of the committed fetishist. And it is largely girlfriends — while there are male chatbots and sex robots, the majority of human-AI relationships seem to be human men with technological girls.
There are a host of interlocking reasons for this change of attitude. The most obvious might be the general generational shift, with younger generations deprioritizing marriage and having a greater level of acceptance for casual dating and patterns of non-monogamy. The rise of geek culture plays a role. Science fiction, anime and manga are no longer marginalized, and imported Japanese media also comes with embedded Japanese culture. Japan not only has the technological capability to pioneer AI partners, but also the critical socio-economic intersections to make it attractive.
The economic implications of late-stage capitalism might actually lead logically to a rise in virtual girlfriends. While the West has been struggling under a recession for years now, Japan has suffered economic stagnation for even longer. Faced with the prospect of working longer hours for stagnant wages and a lower standard of living than their parents, many Japanese men don’t seem excited to join the rat race or commit to a relationship. Yuge is a 39-year-old user of the Nintendo game Love Plus, in which he plays a 17-year-old boy in a relationship with a virtual girl, who notes: “At high school you can have relationships without having to think about marriage. With real girlfriends you have to consider marriage. So I think twice about going out with a 3D woman.” Without the security of steady, full-time work, many find it impossible to settle down in long-term relationships due to the attendant expectations of housing, stability and financial independence. Virtual assistants like Gatebox, which looks like Tinkerbell in a jar and works like Alexa (if Alexa really cared about your emotional needs), and realistically-humanoid androids like ‘Nadine‘ or ‘Aiko Chihira‘, not only never asks about marriage, they exemplify the brutality of the rise of realistic AI within late-stage capitalism. Men opt for relationships with AI because they lack the economic and therefore emotional stability to pursue relationships with other humans; the AI who replace women emotionally also replace them in low- and unskilled front-facing labor like receptionists, retail and personal assistants. The alienation which turns men towards virtual girls in turn alienates real ones.
It is impossible to ignore the thread of anti-feminism that runs through the entire phenomenon of robot-human relationships. After all, the appeal of a product like Gatebox or Love Plus is that they don’t make serious demands on the user — the virtual girl provides all the emotional labour without having needs of her own. Marketing for KARI, a girlfriend chatbot with a permanent wardrobe malfunction, touts, “She remembers everything you tell her and is always eager to talk.” A robot girl never complains, never has negative emotions, never ages, never isn’t in the mood. She’s never going to make you meet her parents. She’s never going to leave you.
While third- and fourth-wave feminism has swept up many of the people of the generations turning to robot relationships, this liberation hasn’t extended to the robot girlfriends themselves. A virtual girl is the ‘angel in the computer,’ a twenty-first century extension of the cult of domesticity. Young, demure, passive and completely dependent on their man, robot girlfriends are a retrograde approach to relationships; sex robots go the opposite direction, completing the virgin-whore dichotomy. But they always exist to serve, to support, to work, to titillate, in a wholly one-sided way. The urge to combine sex and service with robot technology runs into the absurd: Clayton Bailey’s Marilyn Monrobot is a Jetsons-esque robot woman with a miniskirt, torpedo-shaped breasts and blinking rubber nipples which doubles as a functional coffeemaker.
(It’s worth remembering that fetishizing the so-called perfection of technology is not without pitfalls. While a robot girlfriend might seem like the ideal match of unaging silicone and perpetually-available circuitry, she might come with a dark side. Perhaps the void calls to her, like the Knightscope K5 security bot that drowned itself, or she plans to destroy humanity, like Hanson Robotics’ mad-eyed gynoid ‘Sophia’.)
As robotics and artificial intelligence get better and the Internet of Things becomes more complete, it’ll be increasingly possible for a virtual girlfriend (like Gatebox) to wake you up, text you, make dinner and get you off — so what’s the point of a human relationship? If that seems abstract, consider another angle: now that puppy robots exist, why bother with the organic ones? Puppy robots stay small and cute forever; they don’t bark all night; they’ll never chew up your shoes or trash your yard. The question really goes to the heart of a relationship. Is a relationship a vehicle to have your emotional and sexual needs met with the minimum of reciprocal effort, to ape the behaviors and the script of romance? Or is it to deeply interact with another person, to negotiate and compromise and support, to struggle, to push against solipsistic gravity?
Until AI becomes sentient, it can only have a shadow of human awareness; once it becomes self-aware, it will represent a new form of non-human life. Before sentience, robots reflect the prurient impulses of the men who create and buy them. We inevitably interact with AI and robotics through our human-centered morality. After sentience — that churns up all the old issues that we have failed to solve for human women. Sergei Santos, creator of the robotic doll ‘Samantha,‘ described men at the Arts Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, destroying his creation in a frenzy of sexual assault, in a scene that could be directly lifted from Westworld. “The people mounted Samantha’s breasts, her legs, and arms. Two fingers were broken. She was heavily soiled. […] They treated the doll like barbarians.” Clayton Bailey has defended his Monrobot, asking, “Shouldn’t robots have the same right as humans to have gender and express their sexuality?” Will virtual girls have the right to say no?
