June 20, 2008

Meet your intimate partner - the robot

Category: Lifestyle, Technology — Sheern Tami —

Technological advancements have come a long way into creating artificial intelligence walking and talking machines, called Robots. Although we do not see robots working around in daily life in common places, but they do exist and play a role in industrial manufacturing, at least.
Now, the scientists are giving a new turn to the concept of robotics: “Human-robot relationship”.

Scientists say that it could become reality in less than, say, a decade. They are not just talking about mechanical, robotic sex, to be precise’n clear!

These are the words from David Levy, author of the book Love + sex with robots, said at an international conference at the University of Maastricht in Holland:
“… when there are robots that have also emotions, personality, consciousness. They can talk to you, they can make you laugh. They can … say they love you just like a human would say ‘I love you’, and say it as though they mean it … Robots as sex toys should already be on the market within five years, a sort of an upgrade of the sex dolls on sale now These would have electronic speech and sensors that make them utter ‘nice sounds’ when a human caresses their ‘erogenous zones’.

The million-dollar question is: can it take a bit longer to build robots as real partners, with sensual conversation skills!? Scientists were working on artificial personality, emotion and consciousness, and some robots already appear lifelike.

“But for loving relationships — that is something completely different. In loving relationships there are many more things that are important. And the most difficult of all is conversation. You want your robot to be able to talk to you about what is interesting to you. You want a partner who has some similar interest to you, who talks to you in a manner that pleases you, who has a similar sense of humor to you.”

It could happen in 5 years or 10 years… perhaps sooner. You will find robots, conversation partners, that will talk to you and you will get as much pleasure from it as talking to another human!!!

The book by Levy, whose publication has had a ripple-effect way beyond the scientific community, gives rise to a number of complicated ethical and relationship questions. British scholar Dylan Evans pointed out the paradox inherent to any relationship with a robot.

The inherent problem with robot-human relationship is that they don’t have a ‘choice’. They can’t chose or reject you and that leaves the interesting part of attraction and dumping. A robot could be programmed to accept or reject human partners and their ‘will-algorithm’ could be changed by a preset number of control buttons, but that makes them again robots and not human-like; and humans like ‘human-like’, something which is like humans with feelings, interactions, emotions, etc.

Don’t take such hasty steps and be calm and let the technology take its own time to advance and come up with a viable solution; so do conservative scientists advise.

“Let us not exaggerate the possibilities! Today, the artificial intelligence we are able to create is that of a child of one year of age.” said Dutch researcher Vincent Wiegel of the Technological University of the eastern town of Delft.

Levy wouldn’t yield to anybody or anything. He is convinced it will happen, and predicts many societal benefits.

As per Levy: “There are many millions of people in the world who have nobody. They might be shy or they might have some psychological hang-ups or psycho-sexual hang-ups, they might have personality problems, they might be ugly. There will always be many millions of people who cannot make normal satisfactory relationships with humans, and for them the choice is not: ‘would I prefer a relationship with a human or would I prefer a relationship with a robot?’ — the choice is no relationship at all or a relationship with a robot. They might even become human-to-human relationship savers. Certainly there will be some existing human-human relationships where one partner might say to the other partner: ‘if you have sex with a robot I’m leaving you’. There will be others who say: ‘when you go on your business trip please take your robot because I happen to worry about the red light district’.”

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