One of today’s headlines at CNN.com reads INVENTOR UNVEILS $7,000 TALKING SEX ROBOT.

I can’t decide which is my favorite quote from the piece:

a) “She doesn’t vacuum or cook, but she does almost everything else.”

or

b) “For an extra fee, [the inventor will] also record customizable dialogue and phrases for each client, which means Roxxxy could talk to you about NASCAR, say, or the intricacies of politics in the Middle East.”

You make the call.  Or you can read the article and pick a favorite of your own.

As far as video games go, I’m more of an old-school Galaga type of guy.  For me, video games were something you played at an arcade or a bowling alley, though I did have an Atari 5200 home gaming system when I was a kid.  I also picked up the first Xbox when it was released, but while I enjoyed Splinter Cell, I never got caught up in Xbox Live or the MMORPGs (it took me forever to figure out that acronym was short for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), and ended up using the system as a DVD player more than anything else.  When the Xbox went on the fritz, I replaced it with an actual DVD player and haven’t owned a gaming system since.

As I’ve said before during interviews, The Surrogates was inspired in part by a nonfiction book I read in graduate school titled The Cybergypsies, which chronicles the lives of individuals addicted to the Internet through games and chatrooms.  The people in the book would indentify with the personas they created for themselves online to such an extent that they would often lose their jobs or their marriages for the sake of maintaining their digital selves. 

While I’ve never experienced that directly, I can relate on some level.  I’ve lost my sense of time while playing a video game, beginning a session at dinnertime and the next thing I knew the morning sun was shining through the blinds.  And I remember way back in the Atari 5200 days, my stepbrother, Leigh, playing Defender as I went to bed, and still playing the same game as I was getting ready for school the next morning.  (My stepbrother, Mark, was a Joust man, and I held the household record in Dig Dug, though my parentally mandated bedtime prevented me from reaching my true potential via an overnight marathon.)

But for a world like The Surrogates to come to pass, participants would have to be absorbed in the lifestyle for more than the purely entertaining experience you get from Defender, Joust, or Dig Dug.  It would have to be about building relationships, and having those relationships be as real as real gets (“Life . . . only better,” as VSI’s corporate slogan promises).  Is that even possible?

Two weeks ago, this story made its way through the news cycle:

This billboard stands just a few miles from my home:

It goes without saying that the advertisement refers to surgeries performed neither on robots nor by them, but to flesh-and-bone doctors utilizing robotic technology, in this case to conduct minimally invasive procedures with incisions far too small to accommodate human hands.  It’s a sign of how far our culture has come in accepting such ideas, though—consider what the reaction might have been to such a billboard just over 60 years ago, when Orson Welles’ radio dramatization of War of the Worlds resulted in panic and outrage.

The billboard reminds me of a BBC article forwarded to me a couple of years back by Max Handelman, producer of the Surrogates film.  If memory serves, the article discussed efforts in one of the Scandinavian countries (I want to say Sweden) to incorporate robotics into surgeries so that doctors will be able to perform lifesaving procedures remotely, the population centers being so far apart that patients sometimes expire while specialists are in transit.

The e-commute is much shorter here in Georgia, the doctors performing the surgeries typically guiding their robotic instruments from within the same room as their patients.  But how long will it be until the surgeries are performed from the doctors’ homes, or their boats anchored off the coast of the Bahamas?

Surgery by telepresence: yet another use for surrogate technology.

After the collected edition of The Surrogates was in print, a reviewer who enjoyed the book sent me a link to a Wired article about Hiroshi Ishiguro, a Japanese college professor who had created an android substitute for himself that allowed him to “robot in” to work and avoid the morning drive from his home an hour away.  Ishiguro designed the android to look like him, complete with eye movements and a subtle rise and fall of its shoulders to simulate breathing.  By connecting to the android remotely, he controls its movements and even communicates through a speaker housed inside the machine.

Ishiguro’s motives for creating his body double confirmed a thesis that I’d held from the beginning of my scripting for The Surrogates: In a future where you could have an android substitute for yourself, people would use the technology for more than simply cosmetic reasons.  While there certainly would be those who would use surrogates to change their physical appearance (even their race and gender), for others it would be strictly a matter of convenience.   Ishiguro’s not trying to score a date or land a better job; he just doesn’t want to sit in traffic.

Ishiguro states in the article that his ultimate goal is for the robot to have “presence,” to make those who interact with it feel as though they are dealing with the human him and not a machine.  In the 3½ years since the article was written, I wonder how close he’s come.

(Fun Fact: Professor Ishiguro and his robo-double make an appearance in the newsreel that plays during the opening credits of the Surrogates movie.  You see them beside each other, and even in motion the resemblance is uncanny.)

In the future world of The Surrogates, the secondhand lifestyle practiced by the citizens of Central Georgia Metropolis is made possible by the VR Link, a headset worn by the operator that translates their thoughts into real-time commands acted out by their surrogate, while at the same time sending sensory information from the surrogate back to the operator.  A fictional conceit, but maybe not as fictional as I originally presumed—the previous installment of The Future Is Now shows that roboticists are already solving the first half of this equation.  But who knew the technology that would allow us to command machines by thought was soon to be available in our own homes?

That’s what the people behind Mindflex would have us believe.  J Chris Campbell and I wandered into the Mindflex booth at this year’s Comic-Con International, where an eager PR woman explained that Mindflex was a game, the object being to maneuver a ball through an obstacle course using only your mind.  Your brain’s mental activity activates a fan in the base of the game, or so the sales pitch goes, which in turn pushes the ball into the air (steering is achieved through the turning of a dial).  Mr. Campbell was the first to play guinea pig:

(For those of you wondering why there’s no picture of me mindflexing, it’s because when I donned the headset . . . nothing happened.  Concentrate as I might, the ball wouldn’t budge.  Fearful of what such a result implied about my brain, I returned the headset to the table and slowly backed away.)

The skeptics among you may suggest that this is all a hoax, that the little clip dealie on Mr. Campbell’s ear is responding to fluctuations in his blood pressure, and the headband is merely a red herring.  I say nay!  If that were true, then how do you explain the clearly visible waves of mental fortitude emanating from the area of Mr. Campbell’s head that houses his brain?  Photographs do not lie.  Still not a believer?  Then pick up your very own Mindflex when it’s released this October and give it a think.

It’s remarkable how quickly technology can go from cutting edge to parlor game.  All of this reminds me of a conversation I had a few months back with Chris Staros, co-publisher of Top Shelf.  I was telling him about a line of National Geographic kids’ toys that included such things as a metal detector and a parabolic microphone, astounded that what was considered high-end tech when I was a kid (or in the case of the Little Tikes underwater digital camcorder, downright fanciful) was now ubiquitous and cheap.  Chris remarked, “If Hitler had today’s toys, he would’ve won the war.”

The times they are a-changin’.

When I wrote the script for The Surrogates in 2002, I conceptualized the story as being a logical extension of the way people were using the Internet as a means to create new identities for themselves—through chatting, gaming, and message boards—the idea being that rather than jail your new identity within the computer, a surrogate would let you send it out into the world and experience life for you.  Here I was making this up in my noggin, wondering if everyone would think the premise of people living through mind-controlled machines too far-fetched.  Well, Wired has posted a featurette that shows a group of engineers and futurists detailing how close current technology is to making the fictional world of The Surrogates a reality:

Eerie stuff.  I’ve encountered numerous news items similar to this one over the years, which I’ll post here as one of four recurring Monday features until I run out.  Or until the first surrogate showroom opens downtown, at which time the future really will be now (then?), and the point will be outdated.