From IEEE Spectrum Inside Technology, a report on robots created by Douglas Hines and his company True Companion, which treats the story as a cute and natural marriage of libertine sex and the development of modern technology:
For US $7000 to $9000 (based on customization) and a $40 monthly fee for tech support, Roxxxy offers patrons five preprogrammed preferences—gay, bisexual, lesbian, straight, and sadomasochistic—with such monikers as Wild Wendy, Frigid Farrah, and S&M Susan. Roxxxy is svelte and white, but Hines intends a future line of other races, ethnicities, and body types, not to mention additional faces for Roxxxy. A male version, Rocky, is planned by year’s end. “My wife wants to be a beta tester, which is just desserts for my spending time in the middle of the night with girls covered in silicone,” he says.
Will marriage rights between man and robot be far behind? I talked about this in one of my editor’s desk columns last year:
Moving from the living to inanimate, David Levy, a renowned British artificial intelligence researcher, has written a book about human-robot “love” and lectured earlier this year in London about the possibility of human-robot marriage. It sounds wacky, but Levy is a fairly mainstream scientist. I remind readers that while all of this seems outrageous, at one time not so very long ago, so did the idea of same-sex “marriage.”
