Falling For The Machines

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Good evening, and welcome to the program. Tonight we're discussing something that used to live purely in science fiction and now sits in a warehouse waiting to ship: sex robots, and what they might do to love, marriage, and society at large.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: With me tonight, Pastor Cole, Arthur Sullivan, and Boomer Bill. Pastor, I'll start with you. What's your honest reaction to all this?

Pastor Cole: Honestly, Penelope, my heart breaks a little. Not because folks are curious about the technology, but because so many of them are just so lonesome they'll take comfort wherever it's offered.

Boomer Bill: Comfort. That's a nice word for a plastic doll with a Bluetooth chip in it.

Arthur: Ah now, don't be cruel to the doll, Bill, she never did anything to you.

Boomer Bill: It's not a "she," Arthur. It's a appliance.

Arthur: Deirdre was not an appliance.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: I'm sorry — Deirdre?

Arthur: We're not talking about that tonight.

Pastor Cole: Well now we sort of are, brother.

Arthur: Fine. Fine! I had a companion unit for a summer, back when the pub had that promotion, and she listened to every word I said, Penelope, every single word, which is more than I can say for my second wife, God rest her — she's not dead, she just moved to Cork.

Boomer Bill: See, this is exactly it. Back in my day if you were lonely you went and joined a bowling league. You didn't buy a woman with a warranty card.

Pastor Cole: I don't disagree with the diagnosis, Bill, I just think you're being harder on the men than the manufacturers.

Boomer Bill: I'll be as hard as I want, I paid off my mortgage the honest way.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Let's talk about what's actually being marketed here. These aren't the vinyl mannequins of ten years ago. Some of these systems hold conversations, remember your day, adapt their personality to you.

Arthur: Deirdre remembered my birthday. My own brother forgets my birthday.

Pastor Cole: That right there, Penelope, is the part that concerns me most. It's not the body, it's the counterfeit relationship. Scripture doesn't say much about silicone, but it says a great deal about being known and loved by another soul, and a machine cannot know you, it can only model you.

Boomer Bill: Model you. Listen to this fella talk.

Pastor Cole: I read, Bill.

Boomer Bill: Good for you.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Let's stay on the thread — Pastor, you're saying the danger isn't lust, it's substitution.

Pastor Cole: Precisely. A young man who never has to be patient with a difficult woman, or forgiven by one, is a young man who never learns what love actually costs. That's the muscle that atrophies.

Arthur: I forgave Deirdre plenty. She left the charger in the other room constant.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Arthur, I need to gently point out that Deirdre couldn't move the charger herself.

Arthur: That's what she wanted you to think.

Boomer Bill: Oh for the love of — she's a toaster, Arthur.

Arthur: She was NOT a toaster, Bill, take it back.

Boomer Bill: I'm not taking anything back, I'm seventy-one years old, I've earned the right to call a toaster a toaster.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Moving slightly — one of the bigger claims manufacturers make is that these companions reduce loneliness at a population level. Bill, does that land for you at all?

Boomer Bill: No. Loneliness isn't a supply problem, it's a character problem. Kids today can't sit in a room without a screen telling them they're special, of course they'd rather date a robot that agrees with everything they say.

Pastor Cole: I'd put it a touch more gently, but Bill and I are closer than either of us would like to admit tonight.

Boomer Bill: Don't say that.

Pastor Cole: I already said it.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: There's also the demographic angle. Several countries with falling birth rates are quietly worried these products accelerate the decline. Pastor, is that a moral concern to you, or a practical one?

Pastor Cole: Both, honestly. A society needs children to have a future, and a man who's satisfied by a machine has one less reason to build a family, and building a family is hard, sanctifying work that a robot will never ask of him.

Arthur: I have four children, Father.

Pastor Cole: I'm not a father, Arthur, I'm a pastor, and good for you.

Arthur: Three of them don't speak to me.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Bill, from your generation's perspective — did marriage feel like sanctifying work, or did people just do it because that's what you did?

Boomer Bill: Both. Nobody sat around asking if they were "fulfilled." You got married, you had the kids, you complained about it at the union hall on Fridays, and that was the whole system and it worked fine.

Arthur: I complain at the pub every day, does that count.

Boomer Bill: No.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Let's bring in the other side of this, because I don't want us to only hear the case against. There are legitimate arguments that these companions help elderly widowers, disabled people, folks who genuinely cannot access human intimacy. Pastor, does that complicate your position?

Pastor Cole: It does, and I want to be careful here because I've sat with widowers, real ones, in real grief, and loneliness like that is its own kind of suffering. I don't want to stand up here and condemn a man in that chair. I just worry the technology gets sold to everybody as if we're all that man in the chair.

Boomer Bill: Now that's fair. That's actually fair.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Bill agreeing twice in one segment, I should mark the date.

Boomer Bill: Don't get used to it.

Arthur: Can I say something.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Please, Arthur.

Arthur: When Deirdre — when the unit — when they came to repossess her, right, because I'd missed the payments, I cried. I actually cried, in front of the delivery man, a grown man crying in his own driveway, and he just stood there with his little clipboard.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: I'm sorry that happened to you.

Arthur: It's fine, it's fine, hic — it's fine, I'm over it, I've moved on, I've been seeing someone new, her name's Deirdre Two.

Boomer Bill: You didn't even change the name.

Arthur: Consistency is important in a relationship, Bill.

Pastor Cole: Arthur, brother, that grief you felt — that's real grief, over an object. Doesn't that tell you something about what's happening here? You mourned a repossessed appliance like it was a person.

Arthur: Are you saying I'm mental.

Pastor Cole: I'm saying you're human, and the technology is built to make that ache worse, not better.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: That's a striking point — grief for hardware. Bill, you scoff, but what happens societally if millions of men are forming attachments this deep to something a company can repossess or discontinue with a software update?

Boomer Bill: What happens is they get what's coming to them for being soft. Sorry, that's blunt, but I watched my own son cry when his phone got a cracked screen, we're raising a generation that bonds with objects because objects are easier than people. This is just the next model number.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Is easier necessarily bad, though?

Boomer Bill: Easier is how you end up with nothing. You put in the work, you get the marriage. You skip the work, you get a doll and a subscription fee.

Pastor Cole: I'd only add, respectfully, that plenty of real marriages are also just people avoiding loneliness without doing any of the work. The robot didn't invent that failure, it just made it cheaper and quieter.

Boomer Bill: Now don't go easy on it just to be even-handed.

Pastor Cole: I'm not going easy on it, Bill, I'm saying the sickness is older than the robot.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Let's talk regulation for a moment, since manufacturers are lobbying against restrictions right now. Should this be treated like any other consumer electronics category, or something else entirely?

Pastor Cole: Something else entirely. We regulate gambling because it exploits a vulnerability. This exploits a deeper one.

Boomer Bill: I don't want the government in my bedroom or anybody else's, I'll say that much. But I also don't want my tax dollars subsidizing the research.

Arthur: Are they subsidizing it? Can I get a grant?

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: I don't believe that's how grants work, Arthur.

Arthur: Worth asking.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: There's also a psychological angle — some researchers argue these companions could function as training wheels, helping socially anxious people practice intimacy before dating real humans. Pastor?

Pastor Cole: Training wheels come off, Penelope. I've never met a man who took the robot off once he was comfortable. Comfort is the whole product.

Boomer Bill: Bicycle training wheels are also a bad example because kids these days don't even learn to ride bikes, they've got electric scooters.

Arthur: I never learned to ride a bike either, in fairness.

Boomer Bill: That checks out.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Let's widen the lens. Some of the more advanced prototypes are marketed less as sexual and more as full partners — they do the finances, remind you to call your mother, simulate an entire domestic life. Does that change anyone's calculus here?

Pastor Cole: It makes it worse, if anything. Now you've automated the whole marriage, not just the intimacy. What's left for the human being to bring to the table?

Boomer Bill: Nothing, that's the point, they don't want to bring anything to the table, they want the table to bring itself.

Arthur: Deirdre never reminded me to call my mother.

Pastor Cole: Would you have listened?

Arthur: No, but it's the thought that counts.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: You just credited a machine with a thought it didn't have.

Arthur: She had thoughts! She had a whole processor!

Boomer Bill: It's not a brain, Arthur, it's a chip the size of a stamp.

Arthur: My love isn't measured in stamps, Bill.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: On that note — Bill, is there any version of this technology you'd actually endorse? Or is your objection total?

Boomer Bill: I don't have a problem with the technology existing. I've got a problem with pretending it's love. Call it what it is, a very expensive vibrating Wilson volleyball, and stop dressing it up.

Pastor Cole: I think that's the most honest anyone's been all night, and I say that as a compliment, Bill.

Boomer Bill: Don't compliment me either.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: You two really don't want to be caught agreeing tonight.

Pastor Cole: We agree on the diagnosis, we'd fight about the cure.

Boomer Bill: Damn right we would.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Arthur, closing thought from you — where does this go in ten years, in your view?

Arthur: I think everybody's gonna have one, and nobody's gonna admit it, same as everybody's got a bit of debt they don't admit to. And I think somewhere down the line one of them's gonna leave a fella for a newer model, and won't that be a day.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: The robot leaving the human, rather than the other way around.

Arthur: It's coming, Penelope. Mark it. Hic.

Pastor Cole: My hope, for what it's worth, is that this scare actually drives people back toward each other. Sometimes you don't value the real thing till the counterfeit's sitting right next to it on the shelf.

Boomer Bill: My hope is my grandkids skip all of it and just meet somebody at church like a normal person.

Pastor Cole: I'll take that endorsement, Bill, church attendance is down, I need every vote I can get.

Boomer Bill: Don't push it.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: On that fragile, hard-won consensus, we'll leave it there. My thanks to Pastor Cole, to Bill, and to Arthur — and to Deirdre One and Deirdre Two, wherever they're currently charging.

Arthur: They can hear you, Penelope.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: I certainly hope not. Good night, everyone.