The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Sex robots, lab meat and euthanasia boxes
Tech is revolutionising how we gestate, grow food, have sex, and die. Dystopia, here we come! By Eleanor Halls
I368pp, Picador, £16.99, ebook £8.99 n 1931, Churchill published “Fifty Years Hence”, an essay in which he relished the prospect of a superefficient world radically transformed by technology. “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium,” he wrote, imagining the year 1981.
“It will be possible to carry out in artificial surroundings the entire cycle which now leads to the birth of a child”. Had he gone on to probe the technological possibilities afforded by sex and death, his visionary essay would not only have become a bible of Silicon Valley, but a handy proposal for Jenny Kleeman’s fascinating new book.
A tech journalist, Kleeman has spent the past five years investigating hair-raising innovations in the four pillars of human existence: birth, food, sex and death. Armed with a series of interviews with entrepreneurs, both impressive and grotesque, Kleeman maps out a not-so-distant future in which humanity has been so tampered with that it borders on dystopia: from artificial wombs and chicken meat grown from feathers to robot prostitutes and death machines. Each technological breakthrough presents a fresh and fiendish ethical dilemma.
We begin in a San Diego sex doll workshop, where a conveyor belt transports silicone body parts to suit every kink: a three-breasted chest, bespoke labia, a devilhorned head and so on. It’s the home of RealDoll, where, each year, Abyss Creations ships out
600 hyperrealistic sex dolls to a global customer base that is 95 per cent male. Customers pay between $6,000 (£4,800) and $50,000 for a synthetic person they can use in any way they please. This fetish may sound niche, but the sex tech industry is valued at $30billion, and, with the world’s first AI sex robots on their way, it’s about to get complicated.
Kleeman meets Harmony, a $15,000 RealDoll with an animatronic AI head, 20 different personalities, interactive mood settings, and the capacity to learn everything about you. Matt McMullen, CEO of Abyss
Creations, believes she will solve everything from prostitution to loneliness, acting as “therapy for the bereaved, disabled or socially awkward”, as well as a synthetic substitute for rapists and domestic abusers. The idea of satiating such urges is alarming – it’s for this reason child sex dolls are banned in Europe and America. And even when these dolls provide harmless companionship, do they not all encourage male owners to see women as property – to think, as Kleeman puts it, that “it’s possible to have someone who exists just for you”?
Kleeman’s foray into food is no less tricky, as she meets the vegan disrupters vying to put the world’s first “clean meat” on the market. Kleeman is one of the first journalists to try Californian start-up Just’s chicken nugget, grown in vitro from a biopsy of starter cells taken from a – still living – chicken named Ian. Just claims it will be the first business to sell clean meat to the public by supplying high-end restaurants within months. The only problem is, the nugget is so foul – “the texture of the most low-grade processed food I could ever imagine” – that Kleeman remains nauseous at the thought of it for days.
Kleeman plays her aces last: birth and death. Unlike farming and wired-up sex toys, these black holes of human experience remain mystically opaque. They are frontiers you only pass once, after all. Kleeman meets bioethicist Dr Anna Smajdor, who believes pregnancy is not only “barbaric” and a form of Stockholm syndrome, but out of step with social equality. Men and women will never be truly equal until the reproductive burden is shared, which is where the biobag comes in: an artificial womb developed by surgeons in Philadelphia that could be used as early as this year.
For now, the biobag acts to save premature babies, but eventually it could replace pregnancy entirely for women who cannot conceive – or don’t want to. It could also revolutionise equality for gay men and trans women. Yet these privileges will come at extortionate prices. As Kleeman puts it, could natural birth eventually become a sign of low status, perpetuating another type of inequality?
None of Kleeman’s research proves quite so head-spinning, however, as her interviews with Dr Philip Nitschke, the Australian founder of voluntary euthanasia group Exit International, creepily nicknamed Dr Death, or the “Elon Musk of Assisted Suicide”. Nitschke has pioneered several “death machines” that administer painless death without the need for a third person, thus bypassing the legal quandaries of assisted suicide.
His most famous machine, Deliverance, is displayed at the London Science Museum, but nothing has come closer to fulfilling his quest for the perfect death than the Sarco: a sleek, black death capsule that doubles up as a coffin, set to be on the market by 2030. The world’s first 3D-printed euthanasia machine, it offers a
SEX ROBOTS AND VEGAN MEAT
swift, euphoric death by oxygen deprivation. “I like the sense of style, the sense of occasion, the opportunity to redefine death and make it a ceremony,” Nitschke tells Kleeman, to her horror, as the sarcophagus is unveiled between prosecco and parmesan at Venice’s glitzy 2019 design festival.
Sex Robots and Vegan Meat is an epic exercise in concision – all four of these sprawling chapters could have run to books on their own, and at times I wish they had. But a vital epilogue pulls all the strings together, with Kleeman making her curiously belated and infuriatingly hurried central point: all these entrepreneurs are men. “Men dominate the tech industry,
The lab-grown chicken nugget is so foul that it leaves Kleeman nauseous
and their inventions reflect their egos and desires. But women will be disproportionately affected by the technologies I’ve encountered.” She points to the primal, masculine desire for flesh that feeds the meat industry, the misogynists who want artificial wombs to render womanhood obsolete, and synthetic women to own. Even those who seek assisted dying are largely women, terrified of becoming a burden. Kleeman leaves us with the sober thought that technology is not setting us free, “but helping us live in the conditions that are trapping us in the first place”.
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