How did your novel "Sexbot" come about?
I got the idea for Sexbot while riding the train from New York to Florida. The dining car only has about 20 tables, so they make you sit with people you don't know. This is a nice thing in that you eat your meal with people you wouldn't meet otherwise.
One day, I had lunch in the dining car with a Manhattan real estate developer. He was a rich guy, and talkative. He was interested in a lot of things. At first, he was telling me about how the Japanese are in the process of developing robot sex dolls that are nearly lifelike. He was excited by this prospect. He thought that within another ten years, the dolls would be so lifelike that you wouldn't be able to tell them apart from real women.
The important thing, however, was that the sex dolls wouldn't be real women. This is important because real women come with so much baggage - they have opinions, ideas, moods, frustrations, children, ex-husbands, money problems, health problems, jobs, menstrual cycles, favorite sex positions, not to mention sex acts they're unwilling to perform. The real estate developer thought the ideal woman would be someone who had none of these things. All she would have is a perfect body, forever young, and a desire to please her master.
He said, "What would something like that be worth? For me, I know I'd pay at least $100,000. At that price, I'd probably buy more than one." That's where the idea for the Sexbot product came from.
Later, he told me that he had contracted to have himself cryogenically frozen when he dies, kind of like Walt Disney did. He said that within 50 years, scientists will have perfected a process for downloading human awareness into machines. When they do, very wealthy people will be able to live forever, more or less. When the machine starts to break down, you just swap the awareness into a different, newer, and in all likelihood, even more advanced machine.
Even weirder, maybe you make copies of your awareness, and download it into several different machines, or put it aboard a spaceship heading out of the galaxy, or wirelessly transmit it to a receiving station on Mars. You could put your awareness inside the perfect Sexbot type body, or inside a robot submarine, a predator drone, or make yourself into some kind of Robocop / Optimus Prime warrior bot. Once your awareness is downloadable and transferable, the limits as to what you can be are gone.
So why was this guy planning to freeze himself? Because alas, he didn't think he'd be alive long enough to see these breakthroughs. So he plans to come back after he dies, and then be downloaded.
I asked him what he thought about heaven and the idea of missing out on it.
He told me that even if there is a heaven, it can wait. Heaven is for eternity, which is a very long time. The immortality he's dreaming of can only last as long as there's a modern society to support the robots. How long can that last? A thousand years? Ten thousand? Eventually, human civilization will collapse, the robot immortals will die off, and heaven will still be right there, waiting to receive them.