Sex, Bombs and Burgers (33 page)

Abyss’s success spawned a wave of imitators, both in the United States and beyond. In Japan, the sex doll business was already well established, largely because of a different cultural attitude toward such objects. While most Westerners think of sex with dolls as odd, creepy or pathetic, the phenomenon is considered far more normal in Japanese society. Japan has long accepted the standard reasons for having a sex doll—it can provide entertainment for men separated from their spouses for long periods of time and thus prevent marital infidelity, or act as an outlet for those who are unable to have sex with women for various reasons, such as physical issues or simple social ineptitude. Indeed, Japanese scientists achieved media fame in the sixties when they took inflatable sex dolls with them to the nation’s research station in Antarctica. There are even, believe it or not, brothels in Japan where customers can pay to have sex
with dolls
.

The biggest sex doll maker, Orient Industry, sells about fifty a month, priced between $1,300 and $6,900, and exports them to Asia, Europe and the United States. Moreover, the company says the business is starting to go mainstream. “We aren’t targeting ‘otaku’ or people with a doll fetish,” a company manager says. “That boom has come and gone. Now we are getting a lot of healthy, normal people.”
²⁵

”I Can Reprogram Her ... to Like It”

It’s only a matter of time before somebody puts all the existing pieces together. The realistic body of the Real Doll, the haptic feedback of the Real Touch, the artificial intelligence of the SlutBot, the humanoid movement abilities of Honda’s ASIMO—add them all up and you could have a decent sex robot. An early sexbot wouldn’t even need to be all that advanced to sell. “For guys, it doesn’t have to have all the possibilities of true life, you’re only looking for certain things. It doesn’t have to be programmed to have tons of dialogue,” says AEBN’s Coffman. “I’m looking for the head rub, to be honest with you. If I could just have a robot that would rub my head all day after I got home, I’d be fine.” In 2006 Henrik Christensen, chairman of the European Robotics Network, predicted humans would be having sex with robots within five years, or by 2011, which means we’re just about there.

But are people ready for sexbots? After decades of fictionalized equivalents, the media is certainly ready for the real thing. When word got out in 2008 that Le Trung, a man living near Toronto, had built a lifelike female robot to help care for his aging parents, the worldwide media touted the story as “Man Builds Sex Slave Girlfriend.” Trung, whom I found to be mild-mannered and polite when I interviewed him, was befuddled by the attention and feels wronged by how his creation, Aiko, which means “beloved one” in Japanese, was presented. “Tabloids need to make their money, right? The tabloids would ask, ‘How long do you spend working on her?’ and I said, ‘Five hours a day.’ Translation: I sleep with her five hours a day.”
²⁶

Mind you, Trung didn’t exactly help his cause by building sensors into Aiko’s erogenous zones and programming her
with the ability to simulate orgasms. When I met her, Aiko was programmed to bat my hand away if I tried to touch her breasts, but “I can reprogram her not to slap you, to like it,” Trung said. Still, the robot’s main purpose is to care and entertain. She can read medicine labels, announce the weather after checking it with her built-in wireless internet connection, and even sing songs in Japanese. Impressive as she is though, especially considering she was constructed by one person with a budget of about $20,000, Aiko is quite frail. She can’t walk or support her weight and her hands are made of cardboard stuffed into a pair of gloves. She could hardly have sex even if her creator wanted her to.

New Jersey software engineer Douglas Hines has taken it one step further with his True Companion, a robot that can talk and think and is, er, anatomically functional. Hines thinks he’s put most of the pieces together, save for the ability to walk (like Aiko), and so he plans to start selling his creation in 2010 at a price comparable to the Real Doll. His robot, which he’s calling “Roxy,” will be more advanced than previous attempts because it can adopt different emotional states and personalities. “The sex side is easy, but nobody’s integrated these pools of technology,” Hines says. “Roxy takes the inputs she’s given and decides what emotional states they’re associated with. If there are enough inputs given to justify a transition to that state, then she transitions. So, for example, if she’s sleeping and hears that you’re waking up and trying to interact with her, she’ll make that transition if she has enough input over enough time to the sleepy state, and then continue on from there.”
²⁸

Whether the True Companion proves to be a hit or not, most people will still consider sex with robots to be the same as sex with dolls—either odd, creepy or pathetic. But sexual
psychologists argue that this attitude is bound to change. Consider that only sixty years ago, homosexuality, pre-marital sex and masturbation were all generally considered wrong and immoral. Now, early into the new millennium, all three are more or less accepted. Even the staunchest conservative American states are allowing gay marriage, no one bats an eye when an unmarried couple moves in together, and vibrator sales are going through the roof. Even more recently, online dating was viewed with considerable disdain, as a refuge for the desperate or socially maladjusted, but no one speaks ill of it anymore because, well, everybody is doing it.

In his 2007 book
Love
+
Sex with Robots
, British artificial intelligence researcher David Levy argues that having sex with and even marrying robots will be commonplace by 2050, for both men and women. Others, including inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil, believe it will be even earlier, perhaps by 2029. Levy says we will fall in love with our robots for the same reasons we fall in love with other humans, our pets or even inanimate objects like cars or computers. Like
Star
Trek
’s Commander Data, they can be programmed to be just as intelligent, funny, romantic and caring as any human. Levy argues that robots will be even better sex partners than humans because they can be programmed with all the sexual information in the world. Imagine an encyclopedic knowledge of the
Kama
Sutra
!

Robots could also provide “spice” to a relationship by learning their mate’s behaviour and varying their programming accordingly, perhaps by changing their voice, personality or even appearance. And they’ll be able to fulfill sexual fantasies in ways that real people cannot. As one example, many couples jokingly
grant each other a “get-out-of-jail-free” card, a permission to cheat on their partner with the celebrity of their choice should the unlikely opportunity ever present itself. While a man in such an arrangement may never get to have sex with the real Angelina Jolie, he certainly could with a reasonable facsimile. That may seem far-fetched, but Abyss is already making Real Dolls designed in the likenesses of real porn stars working for adult company Wicked Pictures. Licensing one’s image to sex robot makers is a potentially huge source of revenue for celebrities and porn stars alike.

When sex robots do arrive and attitudes toward them change, one thing is definite: they
will
sell. If the historical market for prostitution and pornography is any indication, robots may very well end up being the best thing to happen to sex since the discovery of the orgasm. Some even suggest that the old fear about robots, that they will steal jobs from humans, will come true—in prostitution. “When sexual robots are available in large numbers, a cold wind is likely to blow through the profession, causing serious unemployment,” says Levy.

Somehow, I don’t see Toyota going anywhere near this.

Replacing Teenagers

Teenagers may also be on the endangered list, as least as far as employment is concerned. The boring, repetitive and unskilled jobs that are the hallmarks of many people’s adolescence are ripe picking for robots, too. R. Craig Coulter knows this, which is why he’s helping fast-food companies adopt robotic labour.

Coulter, a PhD graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s prestigious robotics program, knows exactly what his advanced university degree amounts to: $6.50 an hour. It could have been
worse, though. That wage was actually twenty-five cents more than the typical employee got at McDonald’s, which is where he worked after completing his robotics degree. “I had dinner with the dean of the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon a year after that happened, and I told him I had empirical evidence for what a PhD is actually worth,” he laughs.
²⁹

All kidding aside, Coulter didn’t work at McDonald’s because he couldn’t find a job after university. He was conducting research on HyperActive Bob, a robotic order-taking system that he hoped would transform the fast-food industry. The idea for Bob came to him after seeing one too many orders screwed up by staff at fast-food drive-thrus. Like many who have experienced this, Coulter couldn’t could help but think, “How hard can it be to get an order right?” The problem, he found while working his McJob, was that despite being one of the world’s biggest industries, the fast-food business still depends far too much on low-paid, low-skilled human labour. The employees, usually teenagers, are often uninterested in the repetitive and dreary work. While every other industry has actively investigated how to put robots into such jobs—which the military refers to as the “3Ds,” for dull, dirty and dangerous—the fast-food business has been uncharacteristically slow to look at new technology. “It’s the last $100-billion-a-year industry on the planet that hasn’t automated,” Coulter says.

With that in mind, Coulter founded HyperActive Technologies with his friend Kieran Fitzpatrick, a fellow Carnegie Mellon graduate. In 2001 the duo consulted with fast-food industry analysts and found that not much could be done to improve the efficiency of the actual restaurant kitchens. They also concluded, however, that visitors became customers as soon
as they entered the restaurant’s property—in many cases, the parking lot—yet nobody engaged with them until they reached the counter to place their order. The space in between was valuable time that could be spent preparing food for the customer.

The first version of Bob tried to address this problem with a set of sensors on the restaurant’s roof that detected new vehicles as they entered the property. A software program then tried to anticipate what each vehicle’s occupants might order. A mini-van, for example, probably meant children were on board, so kids’ meals should be prepared. This sort of vehicle profiling proved too inaccurate, though, so Coulter and Fitzpatrick focused solely on visitor volumes instead. When fed with enough historical sales data, the new system could accurately predict what menu items would be needed within the next few minutes and beam the information to employees inside the restaurant via an interactive touch-screen. “Statistically, it would be very difficult with an individual coming into the restaurant to say, ‘That guy is going to want a cheeseburger,’” Coulter says. “But if you’ve got ten people coming into the restaurant, you know that two or three of them are going to want a cheeseburger and some of them are going to want chicken.”

HyperActive tested the system with McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and a few other fast-food giants before finding an anchor customer in Zaxby’s, a mid-sized American chicken chain, in 2005. Zaxby’s prided itself on serving customers only freshly cooked chicken, which often resulted in long wait times or wasted food. HyperActive’s system, which costs about $5,000 to set up, reduced wait times by giving staff a better approximation of how much food would be needed, and when. The chicken chain estimates that stores using Bob save about $5,000 a year in
food waste, and they also see other, less-tangible benefits, such as fewer employees quitting. “The turnover is relatively high because people don’t like getting yelled at. When Bob goes in, the yelling goes away,” one restaurant owner said.
³⁰

The big chains haven’t adopted Bob because HyperActive, as a small company, doesn’t yet have the ability to supply the systems in the volumes needed. With Zaxby’s, HyperActive has been able to roll out Bob on a restaurant-by-restaurant basis. McDonald’s, for its part, seems to resent the suggestion that it even needs a robot system. A manager for the chain’s Canadian operations told me his restaurants were opting instead for a staff-scheduling system based on sales statistics. “In a lot of cases, that’s generally too late for you to react to it, which is why we’re doing more on the proactive side of the measurement and the projections of what our sales are going to be.”
³¹

The fast-food giant’s suppliers and other food processors are considerably less resistant to using robotics. Lopez Foods and Tyson Foods, two of McDonald’s suppliers of beef and chicken, respectively, each use robotics—one to package and stack burger patties, the other to refrigerate poultry without human intervention. The market for such industrial robots, which have long been almost the exclusive domain of carmakers, is growing quickly as manufacturers add in new capabilities. Iceland-based food-processing equipment maker Marel, for example, has perfected a robotic system that can wash, de-slime, de-head, skin and filet about twenty fish a minute, while Germany’s Carnitech has built a fully automated boat that can process and pack five hundred tonnes of shrimp a month. Industrial robot maker KUKA, also based in Germany, has helped a meat processor replace its manual butchery with a fully automated system that
uses lasers to track carcass sizes and positions. Industrial food-processing robots made up only 3 percent of the total market in 2009, but the share is growing as processors slowly come to appreciate the military’s “3-D” mantra.
³²

Independent food companies are also starting to get into the robotic fast-food game. Toronto-based Maven’s Kosher Foods has designed a vending machine that can dispense freshly cooked hot dogs, while in Italy an entrepreneur has rolled out the strangely named “Let’s Pizza,” a similar contraption that creates custom-made pizzas in three minutes for five euros a pop. A glass window on the machine lets the buyer watch as the pizza dough is mixed and spun into shape, the sauce and toppings are added and the pizza is then cooked to taste. An American company, La Pizza Presto, has the same idea, but its machine cooks pre-made pies in just ninety seconds. When asked for their thoughts on the new inventions, Italian pizza cooks were predictably dismissive. “You can’t make any comparison, especially in terms of quality. The only benefit is the price,” one told Reuters.
³³