I was there. I knew what I had felt. Just like she had.
“That was not what I wanted, on any level,” I said. “I wanted a sex robot, and that is not what I got.”
Okay, he said.
“She fell in love with me,” I said. “It’s really that simple.”
Okay, he said.
They took her back.
I was proven right within twenty-four hours.
I never watch the news—the television network news, I mean; nobody does—but I did that night, because I had information overload from the internet and I wanted to see one person’s take. So I watched and remember how Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News announced to the world that this next phase of my life had begun.
“Breaking news tonight: independent evaluators have determined that Practical Concepts, an artificial-intelligence laboratory marketing custom-made, purpose-specific robotics to the public, has created the first artificially intelligent being to reach a threshold that scientists and philosophers alike have long thought might be impossible: the ability to feel love.
“Sources at Practical Concepts have confirmed that the milestone was discovered when a customer who had ordered a sex robot returned it, claiming that the robot had fallen in love with him.”
All anyone was interested in was the second part of the story, not the first. This still blows me away. Again: the first part of that news story—the part that could have set off a worldwide conversation about humanity’s most important topics—was only interesting to people as a setup to the punch line that followed. On this point, I believe that all of society had its values completely wrong. I feel entitled to say this since all of society has since made the same accusation about me.
I will state my defense quickly right now—I want to get this out of the way so I can tell the rest of the story. It won’t take long. It is a one-point defense.
1. What if I had discovered what had happened and reacted in the exact opposite manner? In other words: what if instead of returning a sex robot who had fallen in love with me, I had gone in the other direction—professed my love to her as well, announced to the world that I was in love with a sex robot, that I was seriously dating a sex robot, that a sex robot loved me and I loved it back, that I was marrying a sex robot, and the whole world was invited to the wedding? What if that was what Brian Williams had announced? Would that really have been so much better?
Or is it possible that I did the most rational, correct thing that a person with a strong sense of self and, yes, romance, would do in a situation like this and that people are simply going to find the situation funny no matter what?
That’s all.
The late-night talk show hosts, the cable comedians—good for them. It was their job to make fun of me, and they did it well. But everyone made the joke well. Everyone could get the same laugh by saying my name, and so everyone said it. I’m sure you did it yourself. I wouldn’t blame you. If I were you, I probably would have, too.
In drawings and in TV comedy sketches, I became a well-known caricature, with my once painfully average-looking face exaggerated a tiny bit more each time, each parody cribbing from the previous one and building on it, until the predominant cartoon image of me was something so familiar that I could recognize it as myself, out of the corner of my eye across a room, just as quickly as you would recognize yourself in a family photograph that had hung on the wall of the house you grew up in.
Even the more supposedly “intelligent” jokes repeated themselves endlessly, just to remind you how overwhelmingly prevalent this type of joke became. For example, a common political cartoon to illustrate the na?veté of politicians was to draw them on dates with me. I must have been sent a variation of this idea by a well-meaning friend, trying to gently filter my fame for me, at least five or six separate times, with the president or a governor or mayor thinking, I think this is really getting somewhere! and on the opposite side of the table is me.
The guy who bought the first robot capable of love and handed it back. The guy who came across the greatest discovery in the history of science—and returned it, because his sex robot was crying.
Did I get what was so funny about it? Of course.
Did it hurt? Of course.