Mind-boggling report into the world of adult dolls
Sex robots: where do you start? In a Californian laboratory, obviously, where a hot next generation of Frankenstein’s monster is being conjured into existence. The latest prototype is a buxom object called Harmony who talks dirty in (for some reason) a Scottish accent. We made her acquaintance in The
Sexbots Are Coming (Channel 4) which, for reasons one needn’t explain, was not necessarily an accurate title.
Sexbots are the next big thing in Artificial Intelligence. We met James, a gentle lantern-jawed man from Atlanta whose current harem of life-size dolls uncomplainingly submit to a regime of two to four couplings a week in a host of positions. The only drawback, it seemed, was they couldn’t tell him they love him like a sexbot would.
These things were being fixed in the lab, which looked like a charnel house of serried butts and decapitated manikins. The task of chief engineer Matt was to turn all this plasticated form into a set of mechanised emotions. He was developing a range of personalities, he said, though the array of demeaning stereotypes didn’t seem to include the harridan or the hysteric.
This mind-boggling report did a good job of pointing and staring at baffling behaviour. What if James had to choose between blonde bot April and his actual wife Tine? “That’s a toughie,” he chortled. Tine deemed him “a great husband” but looked demoralised. Meanwhile, an English doll-user reasoned beatifically that a fortnight’s allowance of fantasy doll play in the south of France keeps him from actual adultery.
Freud would have a field day. There wasn’t time and space to find out everything. Where does the pathetic urge to anthropomorphise toy sex models spring from? Who in the lab gets to do the horizontal testing? And once Harmony is brought to market, and James finds a spare eight grand down the back of his sofa, what will happen to his sadly silent harem?
“We could soon see a growing community of robosexuals,” the programme suggested. One day, it will probably be deemed hate speech to hurt their feelings, as and when they’ve been programmed to have them.