Why Are People Falling In Love With Robots? - Rob Brooks

You must feel a little bit like a prophet because everybody is talking about artificial intimacy now. Are you a trendsetter in this regard, being ahead of the curve?

Yeah, you know, I do feel a little bit vindicated, um, in that, you know, this- my book came out in 2021, so I was writing it in, you know, 2019, 2020 really, um, and a lot of the things that I was just imagining, you know, this might happen and that might happen, have come, you know, come true. There's all sorts of other things that have come true as well that I never envisioned, of course, but, uh, you know, I think people love to say, uh, "Computers will never do this, AI will never do that," um, and as soon as they do, they're almost immediately proved wrong in most cases. So we're, uh, you know, we're living through times wher- in which, uh, just about any kind of prognostication is going to be true at some level.

How did you get interested in studying artificial intimacy?

Good question. So I, um, I'm actually a biologist, I work on small- well, used to work on small, um, animals and at the nasty things they do to each other associated with sex and mating and reproduction. It's a- a bus- a sort of body of evolutionary theory called sexual conflict, and the idea there is that even a mummy and a daddy who love each other very much still, you know, don't necessarily have completely aligned interests. And in a lot of animals they, you know, those interests are super, um, unaligned, so they're actually trying to exploit each other through mating. And so for a very long time I thought, "This is really important. People need to know about this because it gives you a really interesting lens through which to look at why, in humans, sex and relationships and families can be so complicated." You know, sublime, beautiful, but- but complicated at the same time. Um, and so I was writing a book about that and I- I must say, it took me a long time, five or six years I was writing and writing, had screeds of stuff about all sorts of really heavy topics and, you know, a lot of, um, a lot of the sort of (sighs) what do you- wh- Guilt, I guess, about- about, you know, who am I to speak about this, um, imposter syndrome, I suppose. You know, who am I to talk about this? This is all the heavy stuff, this is the basis for all the culture wars, you know, I think I've got a lot to say here but I know I'm gonna get slammed. And eventually I tried to sell the book to people and they were all like, "This is just way too heavy, way too much." Um, but at the same time I was running a program at my university which tried to get people together to do, um, sort of interdisciplinary stuff to meet big challenges and, you know, refugees and climate change and all sorts of worthy topics, and I said, "No, we're a very technical university, we're going to do something on technology, do living with 21st century technology." And so I got to meet all the people at my university who were working on robotics and VR and, um, AI and we've got some amazing people in AI at, uh, UNSW where I work. And I met them and I got really- you know, had some really amazing conversations, took people out to dinner after events that we'd had, um, and, you know, it became very, very clear to me that they were- you know, had one eye on this, um, and, you know, whilst they're concerned about the killer robots killing us all, you know, in our sleep or autonomous weapons, et cetera, um, they also were just concerned about how- how badly, uh, machines might mess us up. And I thought there's sexual conflict theory right there. And that made a great vehicle for a book that was strangely a little bit more lighthearted and speculative, um, and interesting.