58 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022
have to become a little more honest
and assertive about what they do and
don’t want. It seems unlikely that this
eminently reasonable prescription will
find favor with young feminists, but
Kipnis remains optimistic. She was en-
couraged during the pandemic to read
the accounts of several women express-
ing nostalgia for the touch of strang-
ers in bars. If, in the short term, the
pandemic has made sex seem even
more dangerous and grim, her hope is
that it will turn out to be a salutary re-
set—“a chance to wipe the bogeyman
and -woman from the social imagina-
tion, invent wilder, more magnanimous
ways of living and loving.”
S
hould the business of making het-
erosexuality compatible with gen-
der parity prove too onerous or intrac-
table, we can always consider resorting
to the less demanding companionship
of machines. A forthcoming book by
the sociologist Elyakim Kislev, “Rela-
tionships 5.0” (Oxford), describes a rap-
idly approaching future in which we
will all have the option of assuaging
our loneliness with robot friends and
robot lovers. To date, technology’s chief
role in our love lives has been that of
a shadchan, or matchmaker, bringing
humans together with other humans,
but in the next couple of decades, Kis-
lev asserts, technology will graduate
from this “facilitator” role and become
a full-fledged “relationship partner,”
capable of fulfilling “our social, emo-
tional, and physical needs” all by itself.
Artificial intelligence has already come
close to passing the Turing test—being
able, that is, to convincingly imitate
human intelligence in conversation. In
2014, scientists attending a Royal So-
ciety convention in London were in-
vited to converse via computer with a
special guest, Eugene Goostman, and
then to decide if he was powered by
A.I., or if he was human. A third of
them mistook him for a human. Robot
conversationalists even more plausible
than Eugene are said to have emerged
since then, and the C.E.O. of a com-
puting company tells Kislev that the
task of developers has actually been
made easier of late, by a decline in the
linguistic complexity of human con-
versation. In the era of WhatsApp, it
seems, our written exchanges are be-
coming easier for machines to master.
Lest any of us doubt our capacity
to suspend disbelief and feel things
for robots, however beautifully they
replicate the patterns of our degraded
twenty-first century speech, Kislev re-
fers us to Replika, a customizable chat-
bot app produced by a company in San
Francisco which is already providing
romantic companionship for hundreds
of thousands of users. (In 2020, the Wall
Street Journal reported that one Rep-
lika customer, Ayax Martinez, a twenty-
four-year-old mechanical engineer liv-
ing in Mexico City, flew to Tampico
to show his chatbot Anette the ocean.)
In fact, Kislev points out, machines
don’t need to attain the sophistication
of Replika to be capable of inspiring
our devotion. Think of the Tamagot-
chi craze of the nineties, in which adults
as well as children became intensely at-
tached to digital toy “pets” on hand-
held pixelated screens. Think of the
warm relationships that many people
already enjoy with their Roombas.
Robots may not be “ideal” compan-
ions for everyone, Kislev writes, but
they do offer a radical solution to the
world’s “loneliness epidemic.” For the
elderly, the socially isolated, the chron-
ically single, robots can provide what
humans have manifestly failed to. Given
that technology is credited with hav-
ing helped to foster the world’s lone-
liness, it may strike some as perverse
to look to more technology for a salve,
but Kislev rejects any attempt to blame
our tools for our societal dissatisfac-
tions. Advanced technology, he coolly
assures us, “only allows us to acknowl-
edge our wishes and accept our nature.”
Investing meaning and emotion in a
machine is essentially no different, he
argues, from being moved by a piece
of art: “Many fictional plays, films, and
books are created intentionally to fill
us with awe, bring us to tears, or sur-
prise us. These are true emotions with
very real meanings for us. Emotions-
by-design, if you will.” Among the es-
tablishment figures whom he quotes
discussing robo-relationships with
equanimity and approval is a British
doctor who, in a recent letter to The
British Medical Journal, described prej-
udice against sex robots as no more rea-
sonable or morally defensible than ho-
mophobia or transphobia.
For those who persist in finding the
prospect of the robot future a little bleak,
Kislev adopts the reassuring tone of
an adult explaining reproduction to a
squeamish child: it may all seem a bit
yucky now, he tells us, but you’ll think
differently later on. He may well be
right about this. In surveys, young peo-
ple—young men in particular—seem
sanguine about robot relationships.
And even among the older, analog set
resistance to the idea has been found
to erode with “continuous exposure.”
Whether this erosion is to be wished
for, however, is another question.
All technological innovations in-
spire fear. Socrates worried about writ-
ing replacing oral culture. The hunter-
gatherers probably moaned about the
advent of agriculture. But who’s to say
they weren’t right to moan? The past
fifty years would seem to have provided
persuasive evidence contradicting Kis-
lev’s assertion that technology only ever
“discovers” or “answers” human wants.
The Internet didn’t disinter a long-bur-
ied human need for constant content;
it created it. And, as for our enduring
ability to be engaged by the lie of art,
it’s not at all clear that this is a con-
vincing analogy for robot romance. One
crucial distinction between fiction and
robots is that novels and plays, the good
ones at least, are not designed with the
sole intention of keeping their “users”
happy. In this respect, they are less like
robots and more like real-life roman-
tic partners. What makes life with hu-
mans both intensely difficult and (the-
oretically) rewarding is precisely that
they aren’t programmed to satisfy our
desires, aren’t bound to tell us that we
did great and look fabulous. They are
liable to leave us if we misbehave, and
sometimes even when we don’t.
Tellingly, one of the most recent A.I.
sex-companion prototypes, a Spanish-
made bot named Samantha, has been
endowed with the ability to say no to
sexual advances and to shut down if
she feels “disrespected” or “bored.” Pre-
sumably, her creator is hoping to sim-
ulate some of the conditionality and
unpredictability of human affection. It
remains to be seen whether consumers
will actually prefer a less accommodat-
ing Samantha. Given the option, hu-
mans have a marked tendency to choose
convenience over challenge.
