Theological foundations of lovotics

Scott Midson

In 2004, David Levy published Love and Sex with Robots, in which he outlines a utopian future where humans will opt to pursue sexual and even marital relationships with robots. Robots, Levy contends, will serve as ‘perfect lovers’: they are not demanding, they can be tailored to meet the needs of their users, and they are reliable. Pushing back against Levy’s fanciful visions, though, many commentators – including social theorist Sherry Turkle, anthropologist Kathleen Richardson, and theologian Noreen Herzfeld – have critiqued the idea of perfect robotic lovers as a contradiction in terms. For Turkle, love with robots is misleadingly uni-directional; for Richardson, who leads the ‘Campaign Against Sex Robots’, sex with robots facilitates misogynistic attitudes and behaviours; and for Herzfeld, any kind of partnership with robots lacks the completeness of full human pairings with another person. Across these examples and elsewhere, we find that perfect love doesn’t make sense without reciprocity, emotion, and understanding – all of these are things that robots, at least at present, lack. So what does human, robotic, and so-called perfect love entail? In this paper, I consider these questions by exploring different attitudes to love that span philosophy, psychology, and now also robotics (in a field that is termed ‘lovotics’). How do these themes relate to theological ideas about love, and in particular, notions of perfect love? And what critiques can be raised from theology? This paper sets out a discussion between philosophy, theology, and lovotics as we grapple with the meaning and trajectory of our affections and desires in our current and future technocultural contexts, with a view to developing a posthumanist understanding of love.