Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships Book

This book is a decent summary of the state of erotic robotics circa 2007, but otherwise rather slapdash and under theorized. Levy's premise is that real soon now, we'll have robots, and once we have robots we'll have sex with them. It's difficult to oppose this statement because people are pervs who'll try fucking anything, but that doesn't necessarily mean that sex with robots will ever become mainstream. Levy draws on a wide array of scholarship, from the psychology of attachment, to the sociology of prostitution, to the history of vibrators, but each of these subjects is treated rather shallowly.

The interesting question and challenges about intimicay with AI are totally dropped. What about the Uncanny Valley effect and almost likelife robots? Why should we accept the validity of the Turing Test over Searle's Chinese Room argument? Is it moral to create beings to have sex with them?

At the end of the day, my biggest problem is with the narrowness of Levy's conception of both sex and robotics. For him, the robot is the android-full stop, and sex with them is a supplement to an ordinary relationship, or a crutch for those too socially awkward to keep a human mate. It's a very shallow, very Western, very boyish idea of what sex is all about, and does little to sell that idea that healthy adults will have sex with their lovely robots.