Prosthetic Soul Mates: Sex Robots as Media for Companionship

摘要

‘Soul mate’ says the title. A man and a woman appear in red silhouette, gazing into each other’s eyes, connected by outstretched hands. A love heart fills the gap between them. But this is not a dating website. It is the e-commerce site for Emma the sex robot (sexbot). The manufacturer Shenzen All Intelligent Technology Co. (AI-Tech) promises that Emma is a “real AI you can talk to” with a “talking system and deep learning” providing “unconditional love, total respect, listening to you, feel your feelings, obey you”. AI-Tech promises “a vivid AI girlfriend to satisfy your physiological and psychological needs” (AI-Tech).Fig. 1: ‘Soul Mate’. Illustration from AI Tech website advertising Emma.Along with the other well-known sexbots Harmony and Roxxxy, Emma is presented as a social robot that is not just a sex toy, but a companion capable social interaction and affective connection. The companies that created them (AI-Tech, True Companion, and Realdollxxx) are eagerly racing to create artificial companions with which owners can have conversations (Turkle; Danaher 2) and can provide both sexual intimacy and emotional support. The aspirations of engineers and designers of sexbots are far more ambitious than the manufacturers of the well-known blow-up dolls, which are useful only for awkward sex or comic effect. Designers of sex-bots claim their creations can speak, remember personal details for future conversations, attend family occasions (Marcussen), engage with your children ("Holly and Phillip") and take care of your grandparents in age hostels in more ways than you probably care to imagine. The disproportionate media and critical attention to sexbots indicates the cultural stakes at play in the prospect of sexual partnerships with non-human actors that substitute for humans. Sex and intimacy are important but often controversial human practices. Sexuality is has been associated with a great diversity of practices, including the mediation and assistance of technological artefacts (Devlin, Turned on; Lee; Levy). More than media hype, our fears and fascination with erotic objects can tell us a lot about cultural understandings of sexuality, companionship and technology. However, the forms of companionship offered in images on the website are characterised by a range of meanings: heteronormative romance; compliance; sexual availability; technological advancement; and desire to please.This research seeks to understand the representation of companionship between humans and sexbots, and its very possibility. The term ‘companionship’ has as one derivation as someone with whom one shares bread (from the Latin com-panis) — an impossibility in this case — but has a range of meanings from ‘a trusted comrade’ to ‘a spouse’ to ‘a short term sexual partner’ (Oxford English Dictionary). More recently sex workers have used the term ‘#companion’ in social media posts to avoid censorship (Urban Dictionary). For the most part, companionship refers to a long-term sharing relationship, including those with non-humans. There are already many domestic ‘companion robots’ that offer some form of intimacy, although not sex, such as the robotic dog Aibo, the baby harp seal Paro, used in aged care, and the humanoid robot Pepper, which is also used as a companion by elderly people in Japan. When creators of sex robots such as Emma, Harmony and Roxxxy claim that their robots are companions, they claim that consumers can enjoy a loving relationship along with the promise of sexual intimacy and satisfaction.However, rather than simply rejecting the possibility that sexbots can be sexual partners or companions, we argue that they can be considered as a medium for companionship. In McLuhan’s terms they might be extensions, or prostheses, that support sexuality and parasocial companionship. There is nothing intrinsically degenerate about relationships with dolls. However, the design and representation of the current sexbots tends to overdetermine the models of r