Next, Levy points out that we’re perfectly capable of falling in love with non-humans, including our pets, our teddy bears, our computers and our computerized pets (remember the Furby and Tamagotchi crazes a few years ago?). Once you realize how easy it is to think of your own laptop as a sympathetic friend, how much more difficult is it to imagine having fond feelings for a robot programmed to interact with you in exactly the way your heart desires?

Image Credit... Henning Wagenbreth

Humans, Levy writes, are hard-wired to impute emotions onto anything with which we’re in intimate contact, to feel love for objects both animate and inanimate. And robots, he argues, might turn out to be even more lovable than some humans. By 2025 “at the latest,” he predicts, “artificial-emotion technologies” will allow robots to be more emotionally available than the typical American human male. “The idea that a robot could like you might at first seem a little creepy, but if that robot’s behavior is completely consistent with it liking you, then why should you doubt it?”

When it comes to the even creepier prospect of a robot wanting to have sex with you, Levy takes a similar step-by-step approach. First, he explores why people have sex with other people (for “pure pleasure,” “to express emotional closeness,” “because your partner wants to”). He then moves on to why we have sex with a range of artificial objects, from plain old white-bread vibrators to elaborate mechanical contraptions with names like the Thrillhammer and the Stallion XL. He begins with sex toys you hold in your own hand and progresses to ones you engage in with another person: telephone sex for starters, followed by dildonics (computer-controlled sex devices) and then remote-controlled “teledildonics.”

Robot sex already exists, sort of, in the form of sex dolls — generally slim, big-breasted females with pliable “cyberskin” and a fake heartbeat that increases as the doll mimics arousal. Levy helpfully includes the addresses for Web sites where such dolls can be purchased today for several thousand dollars each. He also writes about the “doll experience rooms” in many Korean hotels (25,000 won, or about $25 an hour), which sprang up after that country cracked down on prostitution in 2004. There was some debate over whether paying for sex with dolls was also illegal, but for now, according to Levy, the prostitution ban applies only to intercourse with other humans.

Throughout the book, Levy builds up his case almost clinically, as though he’s just trying to bring the reader up to speed on an inevitable social development. But despite my own brief robot crush, I would have appreciated a little ironic distance. Levy simply embraces the sexy robots in our future, whether they are a sensitive cybermale or an adoring female robot that is like “a Stepford wife, but without her level of built-in subservience.” But it isn’t the subservience that makes the uniform, unthinking, unblinking Stepford wives so unnerving; it’s the fact that they are — hello! — robots.