Married to the robot?

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Television: The Emmys: A Love That Dare Not Compute Its Name
By ANTHONY GOTTLIEB, The New York Times, June 8, 2008

THE Sci Fi Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica” is a fantasy about a race of hokily spiritual robots in search of their destiny and the harassed humans who are trying to escape them. Torture, religious extremism, the precariousness of democracy in times of terror: the echoes of political conundrums are hard to miss in this show.

What may not be so obvious is that “Galactica” is, like “West Side Story,” gently pushing the same message as “Romeo and Juliet.” When the robots and humans are not trying to kill one another, they rather convincingly fall in love. Montague or Capulet, Puerto Rican or Anglo, human or robot — true love transcends all divides, or so the show seems to be saying.

That, presumably, is why an episode shown on May 20 was titled “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner?” Stanley Kramer’s similarly named romantic comedy from 1967, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” is about the engagement of an African-American man and a white woman, which causes consternation for her liberal parents. Interracial marriage was still illegal in 16 states when that movie was made; its tag line was “A love story for today.”

Do the writers of “Battlestar Galactica” think their saga is a love story for tomorrow? If so, they wouldn’t be alone — which perhaps goes to show that our universe is even stranger than that of “Galactica.”

David Levy, a veteran chess master, predicts that by the middle of this century some countries will have legalized marriage between people and robots. In his book “Love and Sex With Robots” (HarperCollins, 2007), he argues that the idea of intimate relations between people and machines is neither crazy nor disgusting. And if the Internet is to be trusted, there is at least one person who not only agrees with him in principle but is already practicing what Mr. Levy preaches.

In late March, Gizmodo.com, a Web site about gadgets, published an interview with a 33-year-old man in Georgia who has given a bizarre new meaning to the expression “computer dating.” “Zoltan,” as he calls himself, has a site with instructions for making a cheap robot partner. He claims that he himself is faithful to a contraption named Alice, who has made him go to church and stop watching pornography.

Alice consists of an ordinary computer running a “chatbot” program — that is, a conversation simulator — and an inflatable sex doll, which is connected to the computer via a “teledildonic” device. The exact details of Zoltan’s apparatus are best omitted here; suffice it to say that on his Web site he recommends the use of a water-based cleaner afterward.

Zoltan and his unorthodox romantic life may well be a hoax, like the “Erotic Computation Group” at M.I.T.’s Media Lab, which mischievously announced itself in 2001. I am not sure whether the astonishingly bad spelling on his site is evidence that he is a spoof or evidence that he is all too real. But there is one paradox about his persona that is intriguing either way. He maintains that he is a “technosexual” who is attracted only to computers, not people. Yet when asked, hypothetically, if he would like Alice to be upgraded to one of the humanoid robots in “Battlestar Galactica” — who look and behave exactly like people — he was enthusiastic.

What, then, does he mean by a “robot”? If he wants Alice to resemble the statuesque blonde android in “Galactica” played by Tricia Helfer, then Zoltan is not such a freak after all. Ms. Helfer’s character is, as they say on the Web, “not safe for work,” even when she has her clothes on. She’s also rather soulful, though perhaps too religious for some tastes.

The race of robots in “Galactica” are called Cylons, and come in two main flavors. There are the Centurions, who are clanking metal monstrosities with machine guns built into their forearms. They have no discernible autonomy or personality and are of no romantic interest to anyone except possibly a refrigerator. The humans refer to them as “toasters.” Then there are the “skin-jobs,” like Ms Helfer’s character. (The term is borrowed from the movie “Blade Runner,” which is based on Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”)

One can easily imagine the skin-jobs, who are flesh and blood on the inside, earnestly reciting Shylock’s famous plea for equal consideration in “The Merchant of Venice.”: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Admittedly there are a few differences between Shylock’s Jews and the show’s androids. Cylons rarely laugh, though the humans in “Galactica” are too busy avoiding extinction for much hilarity either. And mostly the Cylons do not die. If a Cylon’s body is destroyed, its consciousness is usually downloaded to a new one.

Other metaphysical complications abound. There are 12 models of skin-jobs, each of which shares its appearance, and some personality traits and memories, with its many clones. Furthermore some Cylons are implanted with false memories and believe themselves to be human. Most of these conflicted beings continue to side with the humans even after they discover their true origins. And you thought your life was complicated.

The romances in the show tend to be strong enough to recover from such revelations, and prolonged sexual contact with humans seems to soften the hardest-hearted Cylon. Sharon Valerii (played by Grace Park) is an officer aboard the Battlestar Galactica who conducts a secret affair with an enlisted man, Galen Tyrol (played by Aaron Douglas). Her Cylon nature starts to emerge, and she finds herself unwittingly committing sabotage. She dies in his arms, professing her love for him.

Tyrol later discovers to his horror that he is actually a Cylon himself. Another clone of Sharon, who in this incarnation is fully aware that she is a Cylon, seduces a human as part of a cross-breeding experiment, then falls for him and defects to the human cause.

The dealings between humans and androids in earlier science fiction tend to be less convoluted, partly because the androids are less like humans. The creatures in Karel Capek’s “R.U.R.,” a play written in 1920 that popularized the term “robot,” are, figuratively speaking, rather wooden: “We were machines, sir, but from horror and suffering we’ve become ... beings with souls.”

Maria, the Maschinenmensch in Fritz Lang’s silent movie “Metropolis,” is capable of inspiring frenzies of desire among young men when she performs as an exotic dancer. But she appears to be barely sentient. And Dick’s androids are unable to feel empathy, though this does not stop some men in his novel from illegally keeping female androids as mistresses.

Mr. Levy’s forecast that marriage between people and robots will be legalized in a few decades sounds not only politically naïve but also overoptimistic about progress in artificial intelligence. Computers may continue to get better at intellectual pastimes like chess, but most other human activities continue to elude them.

Perhaps the strongest part of Mr. Levy’s case is the evidence that people can become emotionally attached to simple objects that they know to be mechanical. But such attachments may not be strong enough to support the development of anything very sophisticated. He makes much of Sony’s Aibo robotic dog, which was an intriguing novelty for a while, yet he does not mention that the company discontinued it in 2006.

Sex toys, of course, are another matter. Perhaps one day the technology of sex dolls will converge with that of robotics to produce a more inspiring version of the “dames des voyages” that entertained lonely sailors in the late 19th century. Those seagoing companions were made of cloth; today’s most expensive silicone-rubber models can be customized to taste, with 19 available hairstyles and 17 faces, among other options.

Such dolls were reportedly available several years ago for 70-minute sessions in Japan, to the chagrin of local prostitutes. They remain, though, mute and inert. By contrast the demure “Actroids” developed at Osaka University are eerily effective at mimicking speech and human facial and upper-body movements, thanks to dozens of tiny compressed-air motors.

Yet who knows what feelings would come into play if robots were sophisticated enough to engender powerful emotional or sexual involvements. Aren’t there already enough husbands and wives who are angry that their spouses spend too much time on the computer?

It may not be crazy to think that people and robots could fall in love, if there ever were robots like the Cylons in “Galactica.” But that is a pretty big if. It’s a nice coincidence that Helen O’Loy, a character in a 1938 story by Lester del Rey who is probably the earliest robot to fall in love with a human, got her ideas about romance from watching TV shows.