Love in the time of Pairpuppets

Rob Breszny's "Free Will Astrology," running in the Hartford Advocate as usual (among other publications), hit a nerve this week -- or perhaps a circuit board.

One of the four horoscopes I always read (when I read them), Capricorn's read thus:

By the year 2100, some human beings will be married to sophisticated robots. So concludes David Levy, who got a doctorate from a Dutch university for his thesis, "Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners." Let's use his prophecy as a jumping-off point for your meditation, Capricorn. In your fantasies about togetherness, are you unconsciously harboring any unrealistic desires for robotic perfection? If so, are they interfering with your ability to have deep and satisfying relationships with interesting but flawed people? Take inventory of any tendencies you might have to want artificial partners. Then dissolve those delusions.

This isn't my horoscope, and rightly not -- I don't think I've ever been one for requiring perfection of other so much as of myself, and I've certainly never spent time daydreaming about any potential robot lovers -- but it intersects interestingly with my recent life and times.

Two weeks ago, I picked up The World Treasury of Science Fiction, a rather self-congratulatory collection of sci-fi short stories containing "The Men Who Killed Mohammed" by Alfred Bester. After reading Bester's story, I skipped ahead a few pages and also read "Pairpuppets" by Manuel Van Loggem (translated from the original Dutch, "Paarpoppen").

"Pairpuppets" starts out with our apparently jobless protagonist in yet-another tryst with a real-life woman. The "yet-another" is clear in Joe Shmoe's attitude and in the response from his current date, chosen for him, as they all are, by a computer determining compatibility through mathematical algorithm (eharmony.com, anyone?). The march of one woman after another through his life (not his bedroom -- there are separate facilities for these liaisons) is meant to increase proto-guy's capacity for intimacy so that in the end, he and current-partner-number-X will commit to each other and start a family.

Tangent: I mention the joblessness because it's an interesting problem that the story doesn't deal with at all. In a robotic future, humans' only job seems to be procreation...which leaves us with the BSG $600K question: Why would we deserve to survive? What use would we be at that point?

Van Loggem, after a different point, doesn't attempt to address this question. In the hazy future of Guy Incognito (he has a name, but I've forgotten it and don't have the book with me now), we see only conceiving and raising children as a career -- making the end result more chilling, in my opinion, than it would otherwise be.

Joe doesn't commit to his current partner, or the one after that, but he's intrigued by the frustration the second one we meet shows at his human (performance) foibles. There's nothing seriously wrong with his technique, as far as he or we know, but he's not perfect, and that's what this woman is expecting.

She's expecting it because she's bought and used a Pairpuppet: a robot lover meant to attend to the desires of its owner, and which is physically perfect in every relevant way.

Our protagonist gets curious and does some research, asking a friend about Pairpuppets. Friend advises Joe that Pairpuppets are popular but on the verge of passe -- that most fad-followers are trending off the perfection of Pairpuppets in favor of the idiosyncratic imperfections of actual human beings, the way rich pseudo-bohemians shop at Banana Republic or Abercrombie instead of Brooks Brothers or Armani, today.

Joe eventually goes out into the night and sees a flirtatious, leather-clad, imperfect young woman walking toward him. He is shocked by her forwardness and tells himself that this is it -- real love, beyond robots and beyond calculations done by computers, beyond inhuman perfection, spontaneous and chaotic -- and follows her. They have a quick-and-dirty encounter in a ditch or someplace equally quick-and-dirty, and when he turns to learn her name, she reveals the twist (spoiler alert): she's a new version of Pairpuppet, designed to simulate the need even for idiosyncracy in romance. She's perfectly imperfect, in other words.

That's the end of the story, which reads as a simple twisted-plot vignette, but it didn't end there for me.

The question of career, for instance: If raising kids for who-knows-what-purpose were the actual career of however many humans were alive in this potential future, and then Pairpuppets made humans obsolete as romantic and domestic partners, what job would be left for people? Some people might continue to have children, sure, but only out of a sense of duty, if they were actually falling in love with Pairpuppets.

Of course, the final step away from people having anything at all to do, with the introduction of a Pairpuppet partner that made human partners "so yesterday," is only the final step. Obviously, Van Loggem is portraying a society that has already leased what Star Trek would have called "its humanity" and is treading a fine line at story's start. It's not a shocking conclusion for a society already so far down the path of human obsolescence, that humans become so thoroughly obsolete.

Ray Kurzweil, another link in my recent bizarre chain of "robots are our future" happenstance, was recently featured in a science article for the New York Times. He agrees that robotics are our future -- but he doesn't posit a future of robots making us irrelevant (even to each other); he suggests instead that innovations in sci-tech biology will make our futures brighter than we can possibly imagine.

In the article, Kurzweil claims that we'll soon have a pill that will allow us to eat anything we want without getting fat. He says solar power will save us from greenhouse gases thanks to nanoengineering, within the next five years. Then he says that we'll live, more or less, forever:

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation.

I own his book, The Singularity Is Near. It's approximately as long as The World Treasury of Science Fiction, and it's inscribed by Ray himself to an NPR radio hostess in D.C. (How I got this copy of his book, and for free, is another day's post.) I haven't read it, mostly because every time I pick it up with interest, I read the back cover again and think "Oh, yeah. Robot future. Maybe I'll just read more Neal Stephenson instead." (Any excuse to read more Stephenson, though. I love that man...'s writing.)

But Kurzweil, according to the Times, to the fact that he got invited to the TED conferences, to the publication of such a massive volume by a major publishing house, does not appear to be crazy.

He appears to really believe that we will all eventually be outfitted with robot parts to supplement our current, not-efficient-enough human ones.

We wouldn't be replaced wholesale, necessarily. We'd be added-onto. We would become bionic people, but we'd still be people...we'd just be...well, perfectly imperfect.

This must be the sort of stuff Rob Breszny's been reading, too, to refer to a prediction that robots are our romantic future.

Which makes me wonder whether Rob, clearly well-read and liking to flaunt it, is astoundingly naive -- naive enough to miss his own point -- or genius.

He doesn't endorse or contradict the assertion that many of us will be married to robots in the future. He doesn't comment on the future at all, in fact. (Most horoscopes don't, in the end.) He asserts that Capricorns need to come to terms with imperfections in their partners, side-stepping the issue of A.I. partnerships and their possibly perfect solution. His horoscopic prediction begs -- practically screams -- the question "Well, why don't we just wait awhile, then? Why settle for the imperfect when perfection is just around the corner?"

Maybe he means for us to infer the imperfection of the proposed robotic partners, as Van Loggem and Kurzweil postulate.

Maybe -- maybe, mind you -- Rob Breszny is better at his job than we Village Voice/City Paper/Advocate readers have assumed.

Maybe he knows more about the future than he's saying.

But I sure hope not.