Mostly Human

The dolls have a removable apparatus that enables clients to have sex with them. It's dishwasher safe. McMullen prefers you refer to his dolls as "love dolls." Sex is too simple, he says. "

A lot of our clients tend to have feelings that are beyond sexual desires. So they actually become attached to their dolls. I think love is a little more in line with what it is."  

McMullen, like Lilly, insists that human connection isn't required for happiness. And he's tapped into a niche market that feels the same way. But his efforts open the door for even more complicated questions. Having built human-like dolls, he now wants to bring them to life using artificial intelligence.

With a team of engineers, McMullen is building "Harmony," an app that lets users design their own highly customizable girlfriend. They can pick over 300 combinations -- from body type all the way down to ear size. Users will also be able to program her personality: a couple clicks and she can be quiet, moody, kind, innocent or intellectual.

The goal, McMullen says, is to create more "intimate" artificial intelligence.

"Siri doesn't care when your birthday is or what your favorite food is or where you were born or where you grew up," McMullen explains. "Our AI, on the other hand, is very interested to know who you are."

Harmony will know what you're afraid of. She'll know your favorite food.

"When you get to know a person, they remember certain things about you. That's how you start to perceive that they care about you, that you have a mutual knowledge of each other," he explains.

The app, which will go live this month, will cost $20. Connect it to the Real Doll and you've got a robotic girlfriend in a lifelike form. The total cost is around $15,000.

Arkin warns about building these types of relationships with robots who appear as though they care.

"We create the illusion of life in these particular systems, so that is fundamentally a deception," he says. "This danger [is that] you fall in love with the robot, but the robot doesn't care at all -- it's got no feelings, it doesn't really have emotions."

It's just a matter of time until humans and robots coexist. McMullen's dolls aren't mainstream, but they raise an important question: As technology advances, how will our behavior toward one another change? Will the way men treat these robotic women inform how they treat real-life ones?

These questions are already playing out in the world of virtual reality. Just how the anonymity of the web enables harassment, the virtual world lends itself to new types of problems.

I put on a VR headset and met a woman who calls herself Jordan on a virtual hillside where she recounted being virtually groped.

"There was a player next to me. He came up to me and basically began to virtually grope me," she recalls. "I told him to stop, and that only goaded him on further. He felt more emboldened to touch my virtual crotch... it was gross."

Other avatars were nearby and did nothing as the player chased her and tried to touch her avatar's breasts and crotch. With no ability to push the person away, she was forced to take off the headset in order to escape the harassment.

The experience stuck with her. She compares it to one she had in the real world when she was groped by a stranger at Starbucks.

"It's not that it was physically painful. It's that someone thought that they could take control of your space and get away with it," she explained. "And that's the same in virtual reality and reality. The mental repercussions of what happens after feels similar. It's what stays with you."

As technology advances and VR becomes more lifelike, so will experiences that players have in the virtual space.

"The mind can get tricked in the virtual space to thinking something happened," Jordan says. "And maybe something did really happen to me."

For now, there are no repercussions for sexual assault in the virtual world. Offenders can walk away untouched. But there is a place where actions in the virtual world have consequences.

A high security psychiatric ward in Montreal is using a controversial form of technology on pedophiles.

Convicted sex offenders and rapists are taken into a room called "the vault," where they are surrounded by "virtual victims" -- avatars of young boys and girls that seemingly come alive through immersive technology. Lean in, and they appear to come closer.

A rubber band-like device around the patient's penis measures his sexual response as a VR image of a child is displayed in front of him. His brain activity is monitored and his movements are tracked. In the vault, pedophiles can't fake a response. How they behave in the virtual space can signal if they're likely to offend again, and it is noted in their sentencing. Patients sign a consent form to enter the vault, but if they opt not to, it's noted in court.

Patrice Renaud has been working on the technology for a decade but received permission to test it on patients just over a year ago. He categorizes it as a risk assessment.

"It's helping us to predict a response," he says.

To literally put images of young children in front of a pedophile in order to gauge a response may be cutting edge, but it's controversial.

"I don't think it's crazy because it's in a very controlled environment," Renaud's colleague Sarah Michelle Neveu said. "They're not doing it for their own pleasure. They're doing it because they're sent here by a judge."

One day, Renaud hopes to use virtual reality to help treat sex offenders. He says we have entered an arm's race over who can use VR most effectively. As the technology becomes available, it will also be used for deviant purposes, he says.

A world where robots are programmed to know you, where people form real relationships through artificial intelligence, where behavior changes in virtual spaces and minority report-like technology is not far off -- that's already here. The question isn't whether the technology will exist, but rather, how will we exist with it?