Lady Robots: The Shape of Things to Come On

by Sady Doyle

So, here's another story for you. It's grimmer than the last one, but we tell it almost as often. It goes like this: She's perfect. She's perfect because we made her perfect; because everything about her is entirely within our control. She's your long-lost love, your new and improved wife; she's the girl you never got over, or the girl you could never have. And now, she loves you. She has no choice; loving you is what she's for. Until, one day, she gets too smart. She starts thinking in ways she's not allowed to think. She gets political. And that's the point at which she decides to kill you with her giant metal fists.

The fear of robots is the fear of the twentieth century. They're industrial, they're scientifically advanced and they tend to solve their problems with nuclear weapons and machine guns. Technological progress makes our lives easier; technological progress has enabled horror and death and unspeakable injustice; we tell stories about killer machines. Simple. But then, the twentieth century is about progress in more than one way, and so are killer robots. They're servants that won't serve, beings that we let into our homes because we thought they'd regard us as their superiors, whose compliance we took for granted until it vanished. Race and class are some of the more obvious implications; the killer robot story is, in many of its iterations, very much like entering a Kaufmanian portal directly into Pat Buchanan's head. And, of course, on the long list of labor-saving devices that started to malfunction dangerously in the past hundred years or so, we have to include women.

For one thing, we have to include them because people will seriously not stop making sexy robot girls. They are, according to many reputable sources, including David Levy's Love and Sex With Robots (eeriest feature: repeated references to The Stepford Wives without apparent acknowledgement that it was a horror movie). You've seen the dancing girls. You may know about Aiko, a Canadian robot who is being designed to work as a receptionist, attend to routine domestic tasks and fake orgasms. (Why anyone would want to make a mechanical, Canadian simulation of your early twenties, I have no idea.) Last January, we saw the release of Roxxxy, the TrueCompanion, who is “the world's first sex robot.” She has an expression like someone who's recently been hit in the face with a very surprising brick, five “personalities” and a backstory you cannot anticipate nor shield yourself from. Once you've read the phrase “inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks,” you've turned a corner in your life.

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