I am baffled and dismayed by the idea that an object, however cleverly engineered, could replace a relationship with another human being. Yes, even one who wants to drink beer and watch football. We might want to drink beer and watch football together. Or I might be able to tolerate somebody who is not merely a mirror to myself, who has their own life, their own thoughts and desires and insecurities.
Of course, other humans have as many flaws as I do myself. That’s one of the ways we learn about ourselves, and change for the better, to see ourselves reflected in another’s eyes and feelings, to feel empathy and realise we need to extend the same compassion to others that we want from them.
And of course we risk emotional pain whenever we open up to another person emotionally. That is, in fact, my main objection to sex robots, not that they are too dangerous, but that they’re not dangerous enough.
We learn to live with people by living with people. A simulacrum of a relationship with a companion who is “just there for your pleasure”, is nothing like a relationship with a person who exists in their own right, as an end in themselves, not as a means to your getting your end away.
*
The other two elements of the human condition that Kleeman explores are birth and death, our entry into this world, and our departure. How much do we want technology to insulate us from biology, from the uncaring laws of Nature?
Birth has already been changed. The introduction of IVF separated conception from sex, and genetic motherhood from carrying a foetus to birth as a baby. There is one stronghold of biology that resists replacement by machines, the womb in which a woman’s body gestates every human that has ever lived. But for how long?
The Biobag is one of several attempts to replace the uterus as a place of sustenance and protection for gestating lambs, now, and one day, human babies. Ectogenesis, as portrayed in Brave New World, is the separation of human reproduction from the female body.
The hope it offers for very premature babies is one of the most emotional points in the book. And it’s already a lightning rod for some very strange reactions: from the angry men who see it as a chance to render women obsolete, or from the bioethicist Anna Smajdor who argues that ectogenesis is a moral imperative to achieve full sexual equality, but then opines “that to create another human being is the height of hubris”.
To do what all our forebears have done, deliberately or accidentally, fulfilling social expectation or consciously putting a stake in the future, is now “the height of hubris”. I’m not sure whether it’s the arrogance of imposing another person on the long-suffering planet, or of assuming that the hoped-for child will want to exist, that so offends Smajdor’s 21st-century sensibilities. Non-consensual conception may soon be added to a list of new crimes committed by parents against their offspring.
*
The fourth, and most disturbing, section of the book is about the desire to control death. Not by chasing immortality, but by planning and executing your own exit from the world, with some hi- or low-tech kit to remove another person from the consequences of killing you.
Kleeman meets people eager to use technology to this end, who are mostly, but not exclusively, suffering from degenerative or terminal conditions. Some regard it as an insurance policy that “takes away the fear of the future”. Others want to die because they are consuming resources, saying “I’ve come to my natural end of life, and I don’t want to be a burden on the planet.”
She is clearly saddened by many of the individual stories she hears, and troubled by the gap between shiny technology and its purpose. Kleeman doesn’t think we need a death machine and argues for a culture that accepts illness and death as part of life, for better palliative care, for support, dignity and reassurance, not death.
But she also wants to legalise assisted dying. She never seeks out, or offers, a challenge to the desirability of hastening towards death. In earlier parts of the book, she finds critical voices, and does not flinch from the deeper social, philosophical and moral dimensions of birth, sex and even food. The anti-euthanasia group Care Not Killing, and Not Dead Yet, “a British alliance of disabled people opposed to the right to die”, get a single sentence between them.
After her eloquent defence of the human aspects of intimacy, of bearing children, of compassion for animals as we feed ourselves, I had hoped for a defence of human life as something with intrinsic value, right to the final breath.
Kleeman is right that technology is too often portrayed as a clean, simple solution to messy problems. Sex robots will not fix the atomisation of society, the growing avoidance of emotional pain, or the disruption of traditional gender roles that has left men, especially, feeling redundant, resentful and that whatever they do is wrong.
But a future that harnesses technology to meet human needs and, yes, desires, isn’t a dystopia. We already use contraception to sever the natural link between heterosexual sex and procreation. Without that, straight women would be forced to choose between active sex lives and careers. We use medicine and sanitation to prevent nature killing us in droves from infancy onwards. We use science and engineering to produce more food from less land, with side benefits for the natural environment.
And yet, somehow Kleeman blames these applications of technology for the problems in her book. Industrial agriculture for making meat unsustainable, medicines for making disease and death more terrifying and pregnancy more medicalised, and the contraceptive pill for female independence that has left men lonely and frustrated.
Kleeman’s epilogue is not fatalistic. “We can use the time we still have, before these inventions go on the market, to examine why we think we need them in the first place. Then we can make the changes and sacrifices necessary to solve fundamental human problems, instead of turning to technology to paper over them.” But there’s the ambivalence again. “We will have to make sacrifices… we can’t have everything we want without any consequences, no matter what scientists and entrepreneurs may say.”
Is this a recognition of the imperfection of the world, and the hard choices humans always face? Or is it a masochistic version of the same schadenfreude that wants us all to eat insects because we deserve to be punished?
In Kleeman’s analysis, humans are the problem, with our appetites, our selfishness, and our unwillingness to be content with things as they are. She’s right, of course, that technology can’t resolve social, emotional or moral problems. But technology is merely a tool, designed and used by humans.
It doesn’t have to dehumanise and isolate us. It can connect us, free us from the constant life-or-death struggle with nature, and bring the benefits of civilisation within the reach of everyone. It can widen our horizons and the aspiration to keep pushing those horizons ever wider is a very human trait, and one worth celebrating.
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