Sex robots

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The floor is slippery. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I’m taking a tour of Abyss Creations, the factory where the ‘Ferraris of love dolls’, RealDoll and Realbotix, are made. A thin layer of silicone coats almost every surface. A (real) woman in her late twenties, the PR coordinator, Catherine, shows me round. She has the attitude of a hostess at a theme-park restaurant: bored or stoned or maybe both. I’m sure she’s given hundreds of these tours, heard the same dumb jokes a million times and watched us all slap the ass of a doll reluctantly yet instinctively.

Everyone wants to fuck a robot. Our mechanical lovers have been all over our pop culture for years, as if our longing has conjured the tech: Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, and Star Trek, when Data and Tasha Yar had that thing. The sexbot is happening and, at least in our quiet, private moments, we're pretty much all on board. It triggers that salivating twinge: some object that can be all-satisfying, all-consuming, that we can get right up next to and do what we want with, but won't judge us even just a little. A sexbot, custom designed and programmed to our own perverse specifications. A tool of masturbation unlike any other. More a companion, a cyborg lover, than a vibrator or Fleshlight, and wanted by men and women alike.

A romantic dinner for two, five years from now: Karen is sitting across the table from Ryan. Sipping her oaky but floral Chardonnay, she reflects on just how great life is these days. Ryan is everything she ever wanted in a man. His skin tone is exactly the color and feel she was looking for. His conversation is interesting, ranging sensitively from Tolstoy to cheeseburgers. Thanks to facial recognition, he always knows her mood. It’s almost uncanny how he’s always there to give just the right amount of empathy, just at the right time, or even slightly earlier. He knows her likes and dislikes, her interests and her expertise. At last, she has found her intellectual equal. And the sex.