About a grope or three later, Smith leads to the production room where each doll is molded and fine-tuned to the buyer's request, a made-to-order lover. Here, a plastic wall poster showing 19 different customizable nipple types is displayed on the wall. Seeing an areola not attached to a human is really something memorable, especially when it's labeled “stormy D” or “puffy super.” And they aren't just for making female dolls.
Smith holds up a lifelike replica of a male penis, one of the 11 different types of doll genitalia. “We are just now perfecting the male version, though I think this is enough to penetrate the female market, no pun intended.” Male sex dolls account for just 10 percent of sales, and none are artificially intelligent like Harmony.
Since 1997, Abyss has sold roughly 400 to 500 dolls each year, varying in price from about $4,000 for a basic model, up to $53,000 for a custom-made version. As technological innovations began to progress in science and indusrty, A.I., was the next clear step for McMullen’s dolls.
Since 1997, Abyss sells roughly 400 to 500 dolls each year, varying in price from about $4,000 for a basic model, up to $53,000 for a custom-made version
Although she looks eerily lifelike, under Harmony's glowing skin and pouty lips lives a computer and machine processor.
“Our goal here is to create a platform rather than just an individual robot,” says McMullen, whose team imagines far beyond sexual uses to a Harmony who might teach you Chinese, order you take out and answer your phones -- perhaps eliminating an entire category of relationships we have with people in the day to day. The store clerk, the dry cleaner and the mailman, for example.
So is this kind of A.I. a threat to our jobs? Even Smith at Abyss' front desk wonders if one day she'll be replaced by a Harmony. For now, she is focusing on the positive.
“I got into this business because these dolls make people happy.” Giving people with social issues and anxieties who are incapable of finding and maintaining a healthy connection are why she says these dolls are special. The A.I. factor will provide a give and take relationship for people otherwise inept.
And they're for the heartbroken, as well. “A man called asking if the metal screw in her neck can be removed for more comfortable cuddling, because he lost his wife six years ago and brings the doll to bed. It's heartwarming.”
It's heartwarming now, but Harmony isn't coming for our jobs just yet. In fact, she's part of a long history of human men starting relationships with non-human women."
A BRIEF HISTORY
This relationship between men and non-human women dates as far back as 8 A.D., where Roman myth tells the story of Pygmalion, a sculptor who carves his ideal woman out of ivory and falls in love.
Statue lust continues to 1877, when a gardener was reportedly found attempting to have sex with a replica of the Venus de Milo.
Fifteenth century French and Spanish sailors used cloth to make fornication dolls knows as *dames of the voyage, *and 17th-century Dutch sailors traded hand-sewn leather masturbation puppets with the Japanese, who today sometimes refer to sex dolls as "Dutch wives".
Legend says that after Adolf Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, he secretly ordered an SS commander to design sex dolls for German soldiers during the war "to prevent them from slaking their lust with non-Aryan women."
In the U.S., it became legal to sell sexual devices through the mail in the late 1960s, and blowup dolls hit the market in the 1970s.
Just a few short years later, McMullen came on the scene as a young artist fascinated with human anatomy, and transformed the realism and utility of sex dolls with his lifelike silicone molds. Today, the world has over 250 silicone sex doll manufacturers, and McMullen is the first to make an artificially intelligent version. But he's far from the first person to enter the A.I. market. And he's got some stiff competition.
A.I. IN THE WORLD TODAY
In 2016, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Intel and other tech giants formed Partnership on A.I., an organization committed to best practices and open communications for A.I. development, dedicated to bringing benefits of the technology to everyone.
And while Tesla and Toyota are in the race to make driverless cars, Tesla CEO Elon Musk sees an apocalyptically scary downside to A.I., saying that a global race for artificial intelligence could cause World War III.
But do these sound like fighting words? (click photo)
