Have you ever longed to have your own sex robot, customized to suit all your sensory needs, from appearance and touch, to the ability to talk and illicit physical responses? Yeah, me neither. But based on the success of Real Dolls, we know the market for extremely expensive life-like sex toys is out there. And some think we may be on the verge of creating fully interactive, robotic sex partners. Just check out the NYT video below, in which they let Matt McMullen – the original creator of Real Dolls and CEO of Abyss Creations – demonstrate some of the ideas they’re working on, including “human-like movement”, and “artificial intelligence”.
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We used scare quotes on those last two phrases, because the movement so far is far from human-like, unless you call a terrifying trembling motion “lifelike”. And artificial intelligence? As far as we can tell, McMullen is asking scripted questions and clicking on the suitable response on his laptop. In spite of the interesting possibilities and problems posed in recent films like Her and Ex Machina, and in spite of the fact that Ridley Scott nailed it thirty years ago in Blade Runner by assuming sex robots would be a standard model whenever we get around to perfecting the technology, we are a very, very long way from creating lifelike robots at all, let alone lifelike sex robots. Why?

First of all, the simple mechanics involved. In spite of the millions of dollars being poured into robotics research, the best efforts to combine any kind of movement with speech tend to look like Toshiba’s ChihiraAico:

Additionally, as this BBC piece on the topicpoints out, “Among many other technical hurdles, there are no sex robots today that can stand up“. Of course, the kind of person who wants a robot sex partner may be less concerned about the device’s ability to stand up, but it highlights the not-very-human status of the development of the concept. So, if you don’t mind that your love partner is a freaky, trembling fake woman with a hole in her face who moves like “Zoltan the Carnival Fortune Teller”, and can only lay there and gyrate, we’re almost there! But as the fellow in this video asks, “what if I want to play chess with her?”

Okay, maybe he just keeps asking to make it clear to the ladies that he wants to love someone for their brains as much as their compliant rubber body. But the fact is, pal, you’re SOL. As this recent Wired piece points out, the best AI’s right now can’t pass eighth grade science.

For now, this clip probably sums up the state of sex robots in 2016:

I’ve got you, under my skin….