More Robot Sex

I suppose if I am going to post on crazy-ass movies like Robotrix I would be remiss if I didn’t also briefly review a non-crazy book like David Levy’s Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. From the cover art:

Only fitting. Other little boys seemed to want to grow up to be Batman or G.I. Joe, but I wanted to be Victor Frankenstein.

Levy’s is a good book, though not as exciting as I might have hoped. Levy divides his book neatly into sections on Love and Sex. Love comes across as somewhat ploddingly earnest, an exposition of the almost-obvious. People get attached to objects, don’t they? They very much love their non-human pets, don’t they? They already get attached to robot pets like Tamagotchi and the Sony AIBO. So we can probably expect that when there are humanoid robots that act at least sort-of human, the attachments will get all the deeper.

Yes, I can see that. Even as of 2001, some robots were already looking pretty human:

In the second part, Sex, things do perk up a bit. There’s a lot of good history and exposition here of devices and potential technological precursors to full-fledged sexbots: virtual reality, sex dolls, vibrators and other sex machines are all covered. There’s even an eye-opening account of the teledildonic pleasuring of Net Michelle by Violet Blue at the New York Museum of Sex in 2005 (see p. 267). There are also extended discussions of why men and, perhaps more interestingly, women pay others for sex.

Levy, himself an expert in artificial intelligence, thinks that robots sufficiently appealing to humans to be not just exotic sex toys but something like real partners will likely be in production by about 2050, which might be right — it’s in any event less optimistic than “singularity is near” estimates put out by the likes of Ray Kurzweil. And Levy also thinks that prevailing social trends will make robot sex and possibly even human-robot marriages much more acceptable.

(You mean we have to wait another four decades before you can buy your own robot Selena off of Amazon.com?)

(Life is not fair.)

I’ll offer a technical quibble, which is that the kind of artificial intelligence necessary to make a robot good enough to want to marry would be such a formidable technological breakthrough that we really would be living in an entirely different technological universe, possibly a post-human one in which it would become unclear how or even whether a distinctively human concept like “marriage” would apply. Another possibility, one which Levy himself does not discuss, is that we might be able to make human-like robots whose intelligence rests on modified human whole-brain emulations rather than on hand-coded artificial intelligence. This possibility is one which I’ve written about on ErosBlog before and which is the fictional premise behind the ripping-good science fiction novel Saturn’s Children (by Charlie Stross), which is the book you ought to be reading if you really just want to have fun with this topic.

Though the mention of Saturn’s Children brings up an additional, cautionary thought. In Stross’s novel, ordinary biological human beings die out completely, probably in large measure because robots are more fun to be with than people. Depending on your point of view, you might find that rather sad.

The Robotrices Of Dr. Sara

After posting on Invasion of the Bee Girls last week I pondered for some time about the “what else is there in the soft sci-fi/hard sexploitation genre?” (Perhaps it’s a stretch to call it a genre, but to my mind anyway it deserves recognition.) And then a light bulb went on. Of course: Robotrix! Another movie that clearly has the courage of its demented convictions.

Naturally this “Category III” product of Hong Kong’s extraordinarily prolific Golden Harvest motion picture company seemed worth blogging on.

The movie runs something like this: an hyper-rich Middle Eastern potentate is hosting a international contest in Hong Kong among different robot design teams — the winner gets to design the potentate’s “robot legion.” When the American entry malfunctions and starts running amok, the potentate is rescued by a female robot created by Japanese engineer “Dr. Sara.” Congratulations all round, to Dr. Sara, her robot, and her other robot assistant “Ann,” who looks exactly like Amy Yip.

It’s a no-brainer that Ann looks exactly like Amy Yip. Since Yip was probably the most JPEG’ed starlet in the East at the time of this movie’s release (1991), there would certainly have been an abundance of, uh, physiometric data on which to base a simulation.

All is not well in Hong Kong’s robot community, unfortunately. The potentate’s playboy son has been kidnapped by a sinister, leather-clad figure (played by Billy Chow). In the course of the kidnapping, policewoman Selena Lam (played by Chikako Aoyama) is gunned down. A videotape left at the scene reveals the connection. The kidnapper is mad roboticist Ryuichi Sakomoto. The reason he’s mad is that he’s been excluded from the competition by his government. A videotape left at the scene of the kidnapping reveals his sinister plan. Sakamoto has killed himself and uploaded his mind into the leather-clad kidnapper who, as it turns out, is one very tough and nasty robot.

Well, there’s nothing for fighting a robot like a robot, and Dr. Sara has a plan. The plan involves uploading the mind of now-dead Selena into one of Dr. Sara’ female robots. Hurrah! Mad Science Transformation scene!

Happily it isn’t just Selena’s mind that transfers over.

[Bacchus intrudes in his role as photo editor: “Hey, we’re getting screwed by the wide angle shots here. Can we get a digital pan-and-zoom, please?”

“Ah, that’s much better.” — Ed.]

All well and good in itself, but meanwhile things are getting even worse, because robot Sakamoto turns out to be an utter psychopath, who seems to devote most of his time to raping and murdering prostitutes.

The Hong Kong police assemble a team consisting of Dr. Sara, Ann, robot Selena, Selena’s clueless cop boyfriend Joe, and a group of comic-relief cops to deal with these various crises.

Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t time for at least one hot date between Joe and Selena.

I should like to note that there is a long dinner plus and extended sex scene between Joe and Selena. Bizarrely, Joe is completely unaware at this stage of the movie the Selena is a robot (no one has bothered to tell him that the biological human Selena is dead and buried). From this I can only conclude that either:

(1) Dr. Sara’s technology is really, really good; so her robots can convincingly emulate the way a biological woman looks, acts, feels, smells, etc., or

(2) A horny-enough man will just not notice that someone has turned his girlfriend into a robot.

Ann, who’s always been a robot, asks Selena the next day about her hot date, and concludes that she might like to try sex with a human. (I’m sure hearts stopped all over Hong Kong when she uttered that line.) Meanwhile, someone on the Hong Kong police decides it might be a good idea to have Ann pretend to be a prostitute in order to lure in the killer of prostitutes.

Of course it’s a good idea.

Much death, destruction, and insulting-to-physics martial arts battles later, the police finally subdue and capture Sakamoto, who is transported to Dr. Sara’s laboratory, partially disassembled, and subjected to what former Vice President Cheney and the New York Times like to call “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” to reveal the whereabouts of his kidnap victim:

The cops head off to rescue the captured prince, while Dr. Sara announces that she’s staying in her lab to “study” Sakamoto.

And here we arrive at the Lesson of the Day. If you ever happen to have a partially disassembled, psychopathic humanoid robot in your laboratory, do not store its head anywhere near its body, unless you want to get yourself into a really sticky situation.

Because it might have developed wireless.

And then something like this can happen:

Followed by bad bondage physics like this:

Followed still further by things I shall leave to the reader’s imagination, although the movie itself doesn’t. Needless to say, it’s tough on Dr. Sara:

The cops return, There’s a big battle in which Selena is “killed” again. Then another battle which is the end of Sakamoto. Another lesson: if you are a criminal robot and a large part of your composition is ferrous metals, do not place your criminal headquarters in a junkyard where they have one of those giant magnet-on-a-crane thingies. You’re just asking to be pwned.

There’s even a happy ending of sorts, because before leaving Hong Kong Dr. Sara builds a new version of Selena with her memories and personality restored from backup, but only back to the moment of Selena’s first resurrection. The happy couple bicker comically as Dr. Sara and Ann drive off into the sunset, or at least off to the airport.

There’s enough weird stuff in this movie having to do with personal identity to keep one of Derek Parfit’s graduate seminars going for a whole semester, and in fact I think I’ll suggest the idea to him if I should run into him again. Derek might not be all that impressed by the concept, but for my money this movie would earn the price of its admission on any one of its three female leads alone.

Naturally, I welcome suggestions of any similar material in the comments.

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Ancient French Fucking Machines
• Robot And Stripper
• Robot Love
• I For One Welcome Our New Sex Robot Overlords
• Mandroid The Sex Android (RoboCop Gone Bad?)