Rebecca Gibson - Desire in the Age of Robots and AI: An Investigation in Science Fiction and Fact

Rebecca Gibson

Desire in the Age of Robots and AI

An Investigation in Science Fiction and Fact

Rebecca Gibson has given us this wonderful book that details how these technologies could have an even more profound influenceredefining that in us which is most human.

Chris Irwin Davis, Ph.D., A.I. Research Scientist

Half of the time I plug into the world through technology I am wondering about the people of the other side. As the online space expands, we become increasingly less sure where we stand in relation to digital simulacrums. Gibsons book is a delightful and dirty look on what separates us from the machines, and exactly what those differences say about us if they even exist anymore.

Jef Rouner, author of The Rook Circle

Well researched, engaging, and thought provoking, Dr. Gibson has given humanity a lot to consider when it comes to our desires and creations. The dance between science fiction and advances in technology is always complex and uniquely intertwined, but the threads here are neatly pulled apart and examined in such an insightful way that the reader cant help but find new understanding of their own inner world and the desires inherent to the human condition. A winning combination of entertaining and well documented information and analysis!

Eli Girvin, Talent Analytics Strategy Consultant with IBM

This book is dedicated to the cyborg in all of us,

and the ideas of a nautilus and a nice cup of tea.

Robot sex. The act of sexual intercourse by a human with a robotic or artificial intelligence type being. Yet, somehow, more than that as well. Intimacy , romance , courting, coitus, oral sex , companionship , and the fundamental way we see ourselves have become interlinked with these two words. This book will examine how science fictions portrayal of humanitys desire for robotic and artificially created humanoid companions influences and reflects changes in our actual desires . I will begin by taking the reader on a journey through the theories that outline basic human desires we are storytellers, and we need the objects of our desire to mirror many, though not all, aspects of our beings in order that the stories we tell ourselves match our realities. I will continue by looking at three variations on one story the Blade Runner mythosstarting with the original Phillip K. Dick novella Do Androids Dream of ElectricSheep? (). Using these fictional portrayals, this book will examine the stories we tell ourselves regarding our intimate relations with robots.

There are reasons we seek out differences in our mates; having something mirror us too closely when we know they are not the same makes our skin crawl. What, then, makes a created beingwhether partial cyborg or completely mechanistic human enough , but not too human? Science fiction both creates new species of potential companions and highlights what we already want and how our desires dictate and are in return recreated by what is written. Sex with robots is more than a sci-fi pop-culture phenomenon; its a driving force in the latest technological advances in the cybernetic and artificial intelligence sciences. As such, this book fulfills a need to examine both what is in our minds and what is in our capabilities, when it comes to the creation of such beings. Contemporary scholarship does not seat this idea so firmly in the basis of science fiction , nor does it always ask the ethical questions about how we need to address the rights of and our responsibilities toward the new life forms we may soon engender. In the following chapters, I will attempt to move closer to a deeper understanding of those questions by examining the science behind the fiction and what that fiction tells us.