SEX ROBOTS & VEGAN MEAT

ADVENTURES AT THE FRONTIER OF BIRTH, FOOD, SEX & DEATH

JENNY KLEEMAN

Picador, 368pp, £16.99

This book is ‘a tour of the lurid fringes of the tech world,’ Ben Cooke wrote in the Times. ‘These ventures seem outlandish now, but they are perhaps the first signs of a sea change in how we eat, have sex, procreate and die.’ It is ‘a compelling and thoughtful attempt to understanding where such inventions might lead us’, Fiona Sturges added in the Guardian.

Eleanor Halls in the Telegraph declared the book ‘an epic exercise in concision’, but regretted that only in the epilogue did Kleeman make the point that ‘all these entrepreneurs are

men’ and women ‘will be disproportionally affected by the technologies’.

And so we have hyperrealistic dolls complete with custom-made hair, nipples and vaginal inserts, who can moan during sex and whose vagina has its own heating and lubrication systems. Do such toys ‘encourage male owners to see women as property?’ Halls wondered. Wouldn’t therapy sessions for men who cannot relate to women be preferable?

There will be chicken nuggets grown in vitro from a biopsy of starter cells taken from a living chicken. Why not just change our diet? Tom Chivers suggested in the Spectator. ‘Men and women will never be truly equal until the reproductive burden is shared, which is where the biobag comes in,’ Halls noted. Currently used for premature babies, it could replace pregnancy altogether and ‘could revolutionise equality for gay men and trans women’.

Finally, there is the ‘Elon Musk of Assisted Suicide’, the inventor of the 3D coffin cum death machine that self-administers painless asphyxiation, ‘thus bypassing the legal quandaries of assisted suicide’.

Kleeman infers these new technologies are bad, Chivers concluded, yet the ‘history of humanity is full of the creation of new technologies which often have downsides, yet generally improve our lives. Kleeman doesn’t do enough to convince me that these will be any different.’