Do humans dream of having sex with robots?

Researchers at Tufts University undertook a survey among male and female students on whether they would have sex with a robot. More than two-thirds of the men were agreeable to the idea while nearly the same proportion of women were against it.

My first instinct was to put the difference in the responses down to gender. Who would disagree that men, stalwarts of the Freudian imagination and bane of the evolutionary biologist's, will be down for anything as long as their base appetites are met? When relationships are messy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) a real threat, a sex robot can be the perfect idea to get off.

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Even as I recognise the skewedness of this viewpoint, it is bolstered by one of the most striking films, in my view, to be made on alternative consciousness. Air Doll, by Japanese master Hirokazu Koreeda, is about a sex doll Nozomi who comes to life when her owner Hideo is at work. When together, Hideo takes care of the lifeless doll with the utmost care, bathing her, making her hair, dressing her, and also, having sex with her. But when he discovers her "with life", he asks that she return to lifelessness.

A most heartbreaking film, Air Doll, marketed as a treatise on urban loneliness, is really about the sheer difficulty of fully grasping another realm of consciousness. Nozomi searches for love and, in that basic instinct, she is fully human. But in a world that has burdened love with all manner of neuroses, her wide-eyed search ends in tragedy. It would be easy to paint Hideo as the villain but in our age of hook-up apps and brief liaisons, is he the outlier or the norm?

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Are things all bad, though? The other film that I thought of on reading the Tufts University research was Her, the 2013 Spike Jonze movie starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man from the future who develops a relationship with an operating system called, appropriately enough, Samantha. At the start of the film, Theodore is recently out of a divorce and too hurt to try a new relationship. Yet, his searing, almost physical loneliness prompts him to give Samantha a chance. Maybe it is his bitterness at the failure of real-human relationship that prods him, though the fact that the program talks to Theodore in the silken voice of Scarlett Johansson, must have eased matters.

If Air Doll is about humans spoiling our most tender emotion, Her turns the tables. Here, it is the program that delivers the knockout punch, when it tells Theodore towards the film's end than apart from romancing him, she has been in touch with thousands of other men, real and virtual, with whom she is interacting every second. It is a blow to the gut, to the viewer as much as to Theodore, because it pits our common understanding of technology -that it makes life easier, as Samantha's ability to multitask suggests - against its sudden ability to leach life of all meaning, as happens when Samantha gives love such a void, instrumental understanding.

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The different treatments of non-human love in Air Doll and Her, however, mask a common truth. Both Nozomi and Samantha, in spite of their very obvious fakeness, are beguilingly human. It is easier to imagine this for Nozomi who is after all a full-size doll but even Samantha, with her charmingly flirtatious voice, comes across as a real person. When they are on the screen, it is impossible for the viewer to imagine them as anything but a very real likeness of us. Simply acknowledging them involves constantly fighting the urge to see them as less-than-human.

In making us look at their non-human protagonists as human, both Air Doll and Her put forth a more fundamental question before us: What do we talk about when we talk about robots? As we go deeper into the realms of artificial intelligence, ought we to recognise that we may be simply incapable of making a distinction between robot and human beyond the dry confines of science?

Maybe if the Tufts University research participants were shown a real robot, one of those new-age anthropomorphic ones, before being asked that question, their responses would have been entirely different.