The Future of Love and Sex - Robots 510
nem75 writes "The New York Times has a review of British AI researcher David Levy's book 'Love and Sex with Robots'. He claims that within a span of about 50 years the day will come when people could actually fall in love with life-like robots. While this may seem far fetched at first, he has some pretty interesting views. 'He begins with what scientists know about why humans fall in love with other humans. There are 10 factors, he writes, including mystery, reciprocal liking, and readiness to enter a relationship. Why can't these factors apply to robots, too?' The case he builds goes much further though, and certainly provides food for thought." Update: 12/14 16:16 GMT by Z : This article is very similar to a discussion we had recently.
This is not unprecedented. (Score:4, Insightful)
I had a huge crush on Ryoko from the Tenchi Muyo animes. This crush didn't even require the physical contact that would be present with a robotic hottie. There is little room for doubt that our emotionally sticky limbic system can latch onto unusual objects of affection - I believe it's not unusual to be loved by anyone...or to love anything.
Why not? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Grrr (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there are people that are having sex with inanimate dolls (real dolls plug here), It would not be far fetched that someone would be amenable to the idea and even build a business out of having sex with robots. There are more advantages than using the regular purveyors. It's more sanitary, there are more control on the looks of the service provider and you only have to perform maintenance every so often.
I think that "love" is too much of a word for it. Infatuated or having "a crush" would be more appropriate. It's going to be something carnal and not with meaning. It would take a long time for us humans to develop enough intelligence in robots for us to have a "meaningful relationship" with them.
Re:Grrr (Score:3, Insightful)
Emotionally Stunted (Score:5, Insightful)
It is totally okay with me if this guy wants to fuck animatronics, but he doesn't do himself a service by confusing that with love.
-Peter
Feeling loved (Score:5, Insightful)
It is easy to love someone or something.
It is harder to feel loved.
And harder still to feel loved by something you know does not think or feel.
For that reason, humans will continue to feel loved (or not loved) by other humans more easily than they can connect with inanimate objects.
Re:Old News! (Score:3, Insightful)
And Asimov wrote about this in at least two stories... one about a housewife who falls for a male humaniform robot that her husband brings home from work (name escaping me at the moment) and I think "The Bicentennial Man" also included some robot lust (there my memory of the story is failing me [probably due to having seen the awful Robin Williams movie]).
Re:Grrr (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, I'm not going to have sex with a robot. Get over it!
Uh, yeah, slashdot and all these articles and books and research are all aimed at YOU specifically. Thanks for telling us you're not interested, now everybody focusing on this can give it up and go do something else. Right, come on, get real - whether you will use them or not, it's pretty obvious that sex robots are going to be huge someday, millions of people will be using them, and robot technologies probably won't be going backward as time progresses. People already use realdoll and various other toys, and I'm sure that sex robots will be a lot more fun than Mr Right Hand at least for casual entertainment (which itself will become increasingly important as technology replaces humans in almost every role in the economy, freeing us from having to work so much).
I suppose if robots can be programmed to fall in love with humans, they'd also fall in love with one another? Whatever that means.
I guess letting yourself fall for a robot might be a bit like letting yourself fall for an emotionally unavailable human; people do it all the time, but there is surely some level of dysfunction involved in doing so.
Thoughts on David Levy (Score:5, Insightful)
And what happens when illusion breaks? (Score:2, Insightful)
What if you get into fights? Go to 'hospital' and improve personality?
Granted, it will be cheaper(?) and/or easier to 'improve' and 'repair' the lover, once you bring back the dead lover one too many times, the illusion will break, I think.
There is a reason why toys can't replace pets. For every person who will never adopt one, I am certain there is another who can't live without them for their love and personality.
Re:Falling in love in 50 years? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pleasing women in that way is not (as far as we know) a matter of following simple rules.
Re:Feeling loved (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Shallow (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Futurama Said it best (Score:3, Insightful)
People aren't taught how to think.
Re:Falling in love in 50 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Our egos are too big to even recognize the competition. Men see the good-looking men in the magazines every bit as much as women see the good-looking women. But do we go to the same efforts to emulate? "I'm perfect the way I am. Any woman would be lucky to have me. My ego told me so." Most men have no clue how to dress or groom themselves, myself included.
2. Women tend to claim to want more "emotionally responsive" men, but my real-world observation tends to contradict that claim. Perhaps someone's done an actual scientific study, but I have not noticed men who are in touch with their feminine side having much luck in the meat-marketplace. Cliches such as "Nice guys finish last", and "Women prefer assholes" tend to support that theory.
My point here is that the necessity of competing with robots for "emotional responsiveness" is probably overstated (assuming a suitably emo robot could be designed), because what women claim to prefer, and what women actually prefer (based on their choices in men) tend to be vastly different.
3. I think many men would tend to be satisfied with a physical relationship with a robot, to the point of preferring that over the head-games provided by most women. This is especially true because there would be no such thing as a robot that is "out of your league". If you could be nailing a convincing, if robotic supermodel, would you prefer an average-looking emotionally-unstable human female over that smokin' hot robot?
You may choose to dismiss point #3, but look at the success of prostitutes. A quick perusal of craigslist.org confirms that there are a nontrivial supply of men out there who are happy to pay a few hundred bucks for a 1-hour tryst with a woman they know would never speak to them absent the donation to her college fund.
I think where I come out on this is that women will face more competition from robots than men will face from them. I am not in the field of robotics, but my software experience tells me that it is probably easier to engineer a convincing sex toy than a convincing "emotionally responsive" companion. And that's assuming that anyone has figured out what type of "emotional responsiveness" women truly desire (rather than claim to desire).
Re:From Agnes - With Love (Score:5, Insightful)
Well let me be the first to present it in this manner.
01) No PMS
02) No hormonal imbalances
03) No maxxed out credit cards
04) No cars driven til the motor burns up due to lack of oil
05) No bitching when your with your male friends at a sports/whatever event.
06) No lies
07) No drugs
08) No veneral disease
09) No coming home to an empty house, bank account, garage, investment accounts
10) perfect food, sex, massage, and SILENCE when ever you want it.
Young men tend to believe in love, older men become jaded, and ACQUIRE
the above list of 10 things as I have.
4 decades of harsh reality tends to fill in the above list.
Here is to hoping you retain your innocent unjaded view for your entire life.
~Adios~
Often overlooked (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to introduce a serious note, but there's people out there who could benefit from a little bot-love. People who are disabled, deformed and badly disfigured have traditionally had a lot of trouble finding partners.
Masturbation and prostitutes are often their only access to sex. Love is something for other people. A mechanical counterfeit might be more acceptable than the alternative.
Re:From Agnes - With Love (Score:4, Insightful)
By 45, many women like sex a lot and are RISKY as hell to give your heart to. Let's face it, a woman can go 4 hours a day (more) if she enjoys it.
Many other women dislike sex and you are looking at suffering in a sexless relationship or begging for it.
Remember - 2 to 3% of children do NOT match the paternity of the father.
And the legal system is setup all goofy so that another perfectly capable human being can have sex with you for 2 to 3 years and then take half of everything you own along with your heart.
If you are a man of *any* means, unless you win the love lotto in your 20's, it is more fun, safer emotionally and financially to date/rent women by implying you are interested in commitment and shedding them off when they get too pushy. There are millions of (decent looking, kind) women who are way too easily attracted by a fairly tiny amount of money (like 2,400 to 4,800 bucks a year on gifts and stuff) and 4-5 hours of listening to their problems-- including a lot who are in relationships with other guys.
And maintaining a solid relationship takes a good 30 hours a week-- if you can't hack that many hours, then have fun- get a girlfriend instead, party and do fun things. You'll always be pushing women away so many will be trying to land you.
I think men and women are really not wired to stick together more than 7 to 10 years. I've read some articles implying women lose commitment when the kids are a bout 5-7 years old-- the possible reason being that at that age they could walk and forage their own food so a man isn't needed as much.
Re:From Agnes - With Love (Score:5, Insightful)
The upshot is that it is possible to replicate the object of a man's sexual desires much more easily than the object of a woman's sexual desires, since a man's sexual desires are almost entirely physical. For a replicated male robot to be uber-sexy, it would have to be smart, funny, suave, and have high social status, wealth and power. Obviously, that may all be possible one day but we can all agree that that day is much, much farther off. In the meantime, the asymmetry is going to create a real problem for women.
One caveat: this assumes that sexbots for men will become available sooner than perfect virtual reality. Once we have VR a la the Matrix, robots as sex-replacements will be moot anyway.
Re:From Agnes - With Love (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't think women see some guy walk by and think about how "hot" he is? Or how good he might be in bed? Sometimes I wonder if guys think girls don't think this way to save their egos... If you think they don't, you should hang out with more of them on a friend basis.
I mean, don't vibrators kinda blow away the whole "women can't experience sexual pleasure without amorphous attributes like humor, success, etc" theory? There's sex... and there's emotional intimacy. They're different things but they can be combined to create greater things... do men not feel this way?