by Sierra Greer
The Borough Press (HarperCollins), 2024
We all have needs, right? Does it even matter if you’re getting those needs met by a robot*? What happens to us when the lines between robot slave and human relationship are blurred?
Annie Bot is set in a near future where you can buy a robot for all your domestic needs: to do your housework, to look after your kids, or to get some rough-and-tumble whenever you feel like it. Just set your robot to the setting you prefer, and let its AI system mould itself to your will. The high-end robots can even pass for humans. But that’s where the lines between robot slave and humanesque relationship start to become blurred. What would an autodidactic machine learn, if you were the only one teaching it? What sort of relationship would you create if you were the only one who held any power and influence?
The novel explores the complexity of relating to a robot that is built to serve your every whim, and leaves you a barrage of questions, such as whether a relationship with a robot can really mimic a human connection, and whether complete power over something else corrupts our humanness. What are we losing, if we stop interacting with each other and seek a reflection of ourselves through an AI learning system? Annie Bot explores a tech-human relationship on a myriad of levels: the fickleness and complexity of human emotion and desire, the responsibility involved in teaching another being, and the consequences of us exercising total power over something (or someone?).
So is having a sex robot really just about the sex? Should we keep our primal desires hidden from others? Humans are already simulating and substituting human relationships with robot slaves: is this because we now find human relationships to be too difficult, toxic, or confronting? It may seem simpler to sleepwalk into a future where we no longer have to deal with others’ complex, untidy and even enraging emotions, but would avoiding human connections really be a healthy way forward for us?
Given that AI now infiltrates every area of our lives, and many already look to AI to fill the needs unmet in their human relationships, the serious questions that Annie Bot provokes now need answering. This novel explores themes of domestic servitude, power and control in domestic spaces, and how much of ourselves goes into teaching AI systems. Does a relationship with a subservient object reflect back to us parts of ourselves we’d rather not address? Can you just throw away something you’ve enslaved and moulded to yourself? Annie Bot is an important piece of fiction that explores these pertinent questions in an age when society is increasingly turning to AI to fill the gap.
This novel left me wondering whether our consumer mindset might even consume ourselves. How would you behave if your bad behaviour was simply accepted without consequence? Is a virtual r–pe still r–pe**? As we step into a future of AI learning, sex robots and questions of control and power, we are led to ask ourselves ‘how real is real?’
* This future is basically upon us: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/sex/a36480612/sex-robots/
**This issue has already arisen with respect to Metaverse r–pe: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/05/metaverse-sexual-assault-vr-game-online-safety-meta: “There is an emotional and psychological impact on the victim that is longer-term than any physical injuries.”