The cover of Sexbot, by Patrick Quinlan
The first novel in the series, Sexbot, is a FREE ebook download
OSPREY, FL, UNITED STATES, June 8, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ — Artificial intelligence is on a lot of people’s minds.
Author Patrick Quinlan is one of these people. Quinlan, author of more than two dozen books, has written a sequel to his novel Sexbot. Sexbot and the second book in the series, Nine Lives, are fast-paced techno-thrillers. But Quinlan thinks there is more going on.
“The love affair between humans and AI is coming,” he says. “In fact, it’s here now. I see it in the news nearly every day. People are forming closer relationships with machines than they are with other people.”
In Sexbot and Nine Lives, Dr. Susan Jones, the inventor of the world’s most advanced sex doll, the Sexbot, has stumbled upon a method for downloading human awareness into intelligent machines. Recognizing the market value of immortality, the company she works for, Suncoast Cybernetics, decides to kill her.
Just before she’s killed, she successfully downloads herself into the most intelligent machine available – the prototype for the ninth generation of Sexbots. Now, Susan is Number Nine, dead but somehow alive, on the run from the company, and out to avenge her own murder.
According to Quinlan, Sexbots are becoming increasingly realistic, and are also coming down in price. In future years, we can expect them to become more and more common. But even stranger, and perhaps more troubling, is how people are becoming emotionally attached not just to sex robots, but to machines in general.
“There are already people who are deeply bonded with machines,” he says. “According to Amazon, in 2017 alone, more than a million people asked Alexa to marry them. I asked her this question myself recently. She said it would violate the laws of robotics. Be that as it may, in 2018, a man in Japan named Akihiko Kondo married a laser hologram of an anime character. More than 30 people attended the happy couple’s wedding.”
According to Quinlan, decades ago, the computer program ELIZA proved that people will make emotional connections with a simple intelligence that repeats their thoughts and feelings back to them. Artificial intelligence is much more sophisticated now.
The chatbot Replika, available on many platforms, has more than 500,000 monthly subscribers. Options include friendship, mentorship, a romantic relationship or a “see how it goes” option. An estimated 200,000 of the users choose the romantic option.
“This is something that seems very real, offering unconditional love and support,” says Quinlan. “That kind of love is an ideal in human relationships, but is actually very hard to find. Most human relationships are conditional, even transactional. And people are lonely.”
According to Quinlan, people have trouble understanding each other. This became more true in recent years, as people were staying in their own homes, isolated by the pandemic, interacting with machines more than ever before. “People are wed to their devices already,” Quinlan says. “Soon, people are going to say, ‘Hey, this thing understands me.’ Soon after that, they’re going to say, ‘This isn’t a thing at all. It’s a person, it's my partner, and I love it.’”
“Who knows?” Quinlan says. “Maybe human-machine love will be a good thing.”
Sexbot is available as a FREE download across many ebook platforms, including Amazon. It is available in paperback wherever books are sold. Nine Lives is its sequel.
Patrick Quinlan is the author, co-author or ghost author of more than 25 books. He is the co-author, with film legend Rutger Hauer, of Hauer’s autobiography, All Those Moments, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. He is the ghost author of a USA Today-bestselling series of spy novels. Visit his website at www.patrickquinlan.com.
For more information, or to schedule an interview with Patrick, contact Holly Fawcett at (302) 530-8447 or media@patrickquinlan.com.
Holly Fawcett
Patrick Quinlan
+1 302-530-8447
media@patrickquinlan.com
