How desperate must you be to want to hold hands with a sweaty robot?
In Japan, where robots are being used for such coronavirus tasks as disinfecting hospitals and carrying out contactless deliveries, scientists have produced a device called “the walking bride”. Designed to combat the country’s loneliness epidemic – that word always trips me up, suggesting as it does something one catches through human contact – it simulates the experience of holding hands. Its silicone exterior maintains body temperature, with artificial pores expressing artificial sweat and, when squeezed, it squeezes back. There’s an app, too, that plays the sound of a woman’s footsteps, and the palm is scented with soap.
Quite late at night, though it could have been 4pm, I watched a video of the robotic hand in action. A man, his head cropped out of the frame, strolled with the device slung over his shoulder, his loneliness suddenly… cured? I welled up. I did, I welled up, my emotions now ragged as a denim hem, in part because of “these times”, this year of death and chapped knuckles, when watching people hug on Bake Off has us gasping in horror at the telly. But also because this creepy wet-hand sex doll suddenly struck me as the latest in a series of very bad ideas to cure a very serious problem.
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