By 2050, humans will be having sex with, and even marrying, robots. You don’t believe me? Well, just ask Dr. David Levy, winner of the Scottish Chess Championship in 1968, winner of the 1997 Loebner Prize for the most “human like” computer ($2,000 and a bronze medal!), president since 1999 of the International Computer Games Association and author of Robots Unlimited: Life In A Virtual Age.

Speaking about this book, Levy recently told LiveScience, “My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots…once you have a story like ‘I had sex with a robot, and it was great!’ appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I’d expect many people to jump on the bandwagon.”

Levy gained some initial fame when in 1968, he made a landmark wager with four Artificial Intelligence luminaries that no computer program would win a chess match against him within 10 years. In 1978 he won that bet by defeating the Northwestern University computer program Chess 4.7 in a six-game match. These events led to a prize of $5,000 offered by the now defunct Omni Magazine to the authors of the first chess program to defeat Levy. Levy was finally defeated in 1989 by the computer program Deep Thought[1] Sometime after this, Levy enrolled at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands and began to conduct research into the intimate relationships between humans and robotic partners. His dissertation, which he defended in October of 2007, was published as the book Love and Sex with Robots, published in the United States in November 2007 by HarperCollins.

Now, the leap from competitive chess to rollicking sex may seem obvious, perhaps, only to someone who has focused most of their adult life on chess, computer games and artificial intelligence. And one has to wonder about those Artificial Intelligence guys that Levy began hanging out with. Hugh Loebner (founder of the Loebner Prize) is quoted at the beginning of one of Levy’s first academic publications as saying: “I pay for sex because that is the only way I can get sex. I am not ashamed of paying for sex. I pay for food. I pay for clothing. I pay for shelter. Why should I not also pay for sex? Paying for sex does not diminish the pleasure I derive from it.”

To be fair, the goal of Robots Unlimited is to provide a comprehensive review of the past 50 years of research and development in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Only part of this book is devoted to ruminating on the future abilities that robots may one day possess. However, any publisher making money these days knows a good story when they see one (i.e., preferably something containing the words “sex” and violating some perceived ethical or moral values). So, you can expect to see Dr. Levy appearing everywhere in support of this thesis. If the quotes he provided to Cory Silverberg, Sexuality editor at Ask.com are any indication, Levy’s ratings value on talk-shows should remain pretty high:

I hope and believe that one of the great benefits of sexual robots will be their ability to teach lovemaking skills, so that men who do feel inadequate will be able to take unlimited lessons, in private, from robot lovers who possess an unrivalled level of knowledge of sexual techniques and psycho-sexual problems, combined with great skills as sensitive, patient teachers. And of course, some women will also wish to avail themselves of the sexual teaching skills of robots.

Response from relationship researchers as to who or why people might choose to have sex with robots, or what impact this would have on the development of intra human relationships if widely adopted is, so far, difficult to find.

[1] Deep Thought was developed by a team at Carnegie Mellon University. Although the first computer program ranked at a “grandmaster” level, and the first program to defeat several rated grand-masters in tournament play, Deep Thought was defeated handily by reigning world-master of chess, Gary Kasparov in 1989. It was not until 1997 that a powerfully souped-up Deep Thought 2 was able to defeat Kasparov. Click here for a brief overview of the history of computer chess.

Further Reading:

Interview with Cory Silverberg on Ask.com: http://sexuality.about.com/od/sexandtechnology/a/david_levy.htm

Interview with David Levy on LiveScience: http://www.livescience.com/technology/071012-robot-marriage.html

Robot Prostitutes as Alternatives to Human Sex Workers, article in roboethics.org: http://www.roboethics.org/icra07/contributions/LEVY%20Robot%20Prostitutes%20as%20Alternatives%20to%20Human%20Sex%20Workers.pdf

Loebner, H. “Being a John.” In Prostitution: On Whores, Hustlers, and Johns, Elias, J., Bullough, V., Elias, V. & Brewer, G. (Eds.), Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, 1998.