My electronic lover

Love and Sex with Robots, by David LevyHarper Collins, 350 pages. $24.95

(Hebrew edition translated by Michal Mayorchik; Sdera Press, 334 pages, NIS 80 )

David Levy's "Love and Sex with Robots" opens with a dedication to an MIT student who tried to ingratiate himself with members of the second sex, but discovered that he preferred relationships with computers. Indeed, love and sex with robots is a geek's dream in a world in which fetishism for technological toys is taking the place of human relationships. At the same time, many others see the mechanization and so-called technologization of sex and love as cause for alarm.

In his book, first published in English in 2007, Levy foresees a world in which people not only have sex with robots, but also fall in love with robots and even marry them, a world in which high school students prefer dates with robots and where robots are perfect friends and lovers. These ideas may sound ridiculous or delusional, but despite its sensational title, "Love and Sex with Robots" is profound, scholarly and well-reasoned. Levy, who wrote his doctoral thesis at the Netherlands' Maastricht University on the relations between people and robots, meticulously analyzes the way that people and their technological gadgets are growing closer all the time. He bases his work on a wide range of recent pathbreaking studies suggesting that relations between people and computers are not as simple as they seem, and that they include, among other things, values that we usually think exist only between people, such as politeness and friendship.

Levy introduces a wide variety of studies regarding such relationships, and extracts a trend of our increasing personification of technology as it develops. While the first robots were industrial, no more than automatic devices, the next generation of service robots, which perform functions such as cleaning and carrying mail, interact with people more. Robotic pets and caregivers for infants and the elderly, which are already being produced, represent the latest stage in the ever-increasing intimacy between people and machines. The next step, at least according to Levy, is a robot designed for love and sex.

It's a big stretch to see how robots could become the objects of human desire. Levy devotes many pages to research that examines why people fall in love with or are attracted to other people. He closely investigates the ways in which robots of the future might use human emotional mechanisms to befriend us and arouse desire. This is one of the book's best sections, simply because the attempt to create an algorithm of love and the robotizing of sex brilliantly enlightens how human communication works, and presents a kind of ethology of human sex and love.

By 2050, Levy says, we will have the ability to create intelligent, gendered robots whose character and looks are designed to our taste. We will be able not only to determine the size and shape of their sex organs, but also to supply these robots with all the information in the Kama Sutra and similar books, in order to turn them into super-lovers. The transformation of love into a product, the commodification of love, if you like, will reach its height in this way. Your robot, Levy says, "will arrive from the factory with these parameters set as you specified, but it will always be possible to ask for more ardor, more passion, or less, according to your mood and energy level." The many advantages of sexbots should include a reduction in abortions, prostitution, teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and pedophilia, Levy writes. Ultimately, he says, there will be an entire generation that has never had sex with another human being.

There are a few problems with the techno-utopia that Levy describes. First of all, his vision depends on the expectation of a significant breakthrough in the area of artificial intelligence. Levy's forecasts may not be in the most far-out reaches of this field, but there are no guarantees about the future of strong AI, which has so far advanced quite slowly.

But even if his predictions come true, it still seems that a scientific attempt at programming love is likely to crash when confronted with the capriciousness and arbitrariness that characterize human emotions. Can a robot that fulfills all our wishes sustain our interest? Isn't it exactly those unexpected, uncertain, arbitrary aspects of love that give it such great power? Levy is aware of the problem, of course. He writes that "some humans might feel that a certain fragility is missing in their robot relationship, relative to a human-human relationship, but that fragility, that transient aspect of human-human relationships, as with so much else in robotics, will be capable of simulation."

But the need of Levy and others to simulate love and create robots that take into account the contradictions of the human soul leads to profound, and disturbing, questions. For example, what about the human need to win love from an entity that is capable of independent thinking and decision making? What is the meaning of a declaration of robotic love? In this Levy follows the lead of computer pioneer Alan Turing, who said that if a machine seems intelligent, we have to conclude that it is intelligent. Levy admits that the idea of a robot loving you seems a little horrifying at first. But if the robot's behavior is completely consistent, why doubt it? In a future where robots have convincing looks and behavior, people who live with them daily will see them as partners and friends, Levy claims.

The sharpest moments in "Love and Sex with Robots" offer surprising new insights into the relationship between people and computers, and a fascinating history of the connection between sexuality and technology (the book contains a large section on the evolution of sex technology over the last few centuries, from vibrators to sex dolls ). At weaker moments, though, Levy is overly optimistic, tries too hard to prove questionable hypotheses, and is too hasty in providing solutions to the existential and philosophical problems those hypotheses are likely to generate.

The work is a pioneering book in a pioneering field. It's okay to be alarmed by it, and perhaps one should be. But don't underestimate it. The issues it raises are likely to become decisive in the human society of the 21st century.

Ido Hartogsohn is the author of "Technomysticism: Consciousness in the Age of Technology" (in Hebrew, Madaf Press ).

Haaretz Books, January 2010, haaretzbooks@gmail.com