Robots will inevitably enter our lives and bedroom

Yesterday, while walking past a movie theater, I came across a particularly interesting promo… Yesterday, while walking past a movie theater, I came across a particularly interesting promo poster. The poster showed a robot with thin, gray limbs, a white torso and an unsettlingly humanoid face. Below it were the words “What will you do with yours?”

The poster advertised “I, Robot,” the upcoming big-screen adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s 1954 short story collection. It is a testament to Asimov’s genius that the implications of his classic book are still absolutely relevant after 50 years of rapid technological advancement. How would humanity interact with an entire underclass of mechanical beings? What precautions would be needed to prevent robots from rebelling against their human masters? Could beings of artificial intelligence find solutions to mankind’s political problems? Should they?

Yet, when I saw that frail, ingenuous-looking robot and the words “What will you do with yours?” I wasn’t thinking of any of these questions. I was thinking that, if there ever comes a time when a population of robots serves mankind, many people will try to have sex with them.

Sex toys make up a multi-million-dollar industry. Think of all the products, many of which are battery-powered, sold each year to help people reach sexual gratification without a partner. Think of all the things people either unfamiliar with or bored of sex toys have used to improvise. A newspaper sex columnist or veteran 911 operator can tell you that “American Pie” featured only the mildest examples of human-on-object love.

Now imagine a world in which upper- and middle class families live with robot servants. They cook for us. They clean for us. They do whatever we tell them to do. Someone, somewhere (probably in Arkansas) is going to get the idea to molest one.

It will start with a teenage boy who becomes an urban legend the night his parents return home from the office Christmas party to find him lying unconscious on the living room floor, naked from the waist down, electrocuted.

Soon — because living in an industrial, capitalist society means someone is always inventing a new way to profit from a fundamental human need — there will come custom-designed, orifice-sporting pleasurebots.

Perhaps robots of this type will be programmed with personalities that will make them sexier. A few weeks ago, I interacted with Valerie, Carnegie Mellon University’s computer-animated roboceptionist. That robot, with its icy voice and offhand mannerisms, was sexy. Damn sexy. Nancy Sinatra singing “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” sexy.

“I, Robot” started me on this train of thought, but perhaps “The Stepford Wives,” another soon-to-be-released film based on a classic science fiction book, explores the idea better. Adapted from a 1972 Ira Levin novel, this film features a group of suburban men who secretly replace their wives with robot look-alikes, one of which is played by Nicole Kidman.

If something looks like Nicole Kidman, even if it is a soulless machine, every heterosexual man with a pulse is going to try to get with it.

It will be a strange world to live in — one in which robots prepare our meals, drive our cars, guard our homes, and, in return, are violated by us. I, for one, am against robot sex. But once we have reached a technological plateau where robots resemble hot-bodied, smoky-eyed, pouty-lipped, Australian actresses, then I suppose resistance is futile.

If Nicole Kidman or any robot resembling her would like a date with Nick Keppler, she or it can e-mail him at pnk6@pitt.edu.