‘The Sex Robots Are Coming’ screened last night on UK terrestrial ‘channel 4’ and I have to say, it was on the whole rather good. Most of it was balanced and the entire documentary focused mainly on a sympathetic profile of a somewhat elderly doll lover called James, interspersed with illuminating ‘behind the scenes’ insights into Matt McMullen’s efforta to build the first true artificially intelligent sex robot – ‘Harmony’ – which are evidently very near fruition. The documentary climaxed, almost literally, with an excited James getting to be Harmony’s very first date.
Pleasingly, James wasn’t really presented as a weirdo, and when it might have been – such as taking his favorite doll to the barbers to have her hair cut – it was sympathetically done, and seemed to be really presenting the argument that men will fall in love with sexbots rather easily, as apparently normal people like him can already do so with dolls. James was also shown to be in what appears to be a very happy marriage with a similar age wife who is totally supportive of her husband’s penchant for sex dolls, perhaps also presenting the angle that sexbots might not be such a mortal threat to womankind after all. Indeed, the most surprising aspect of the doc was that Dr Kathleen Richardson, self-declared ‘anti-sex robot campaigner’, was given little more than a few seconds to play her pantomime act, less than Matt McMullen certainly was given to present a moral defence of sex robots and the right of people to choose to buy them.
If you live in the UK you can watch it for the next few days at the following link : http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-sex-robots-are-coming/on-demand/62535-001
If you live outside of the UK you may need a proxy service that gives you a British IP.
A good review from the mainstream press appeared in The Telegraph
