Anthropologist Tracks Our Obsession With Digital Worlds And Robot Sex

'Ex Machina' is nominated for Best Writing – Original Screenplay during the 88th Oscars Nominations Announcement at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The rise of social media and the ubiquity of cell phones has caused some people to bemoan the state of actual human interaction in the 21st century. But anthropologist Rebecca Gibson argues in a new paper in the journal Sexuality & Culture that our obsession with interaction with the digital has a long history -- and an interesting future. Working through the lens of sci-fi, Gibson tracks the evolution of, in particular, the kind of stories that involve human and android romance and sex, delving into them anthropologically to show how these stories illuminate the human condition. First, Gibson explores Phillip K. Dick's character of Rachel in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, suggesting that early conceptions of androids focused on whether they themselves knew they were not human, and she situates this within a framework of Freudian psychoanalysis.