Sex, Dolls, Robots, Love and Marriage

Artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands recently completed (Oct 12, 2007) his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships. 

His work reminds me of “The Caves of Steel“, from Asimov, where Elijah Baley, the human detective, and R. Daneel Olivaw his number 2 robot detective, introduce in 1954  the story of an human-robot relationship  bearing a great likelihood to what Levy to day proposes … (I quote) “In his thesis, “Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners,” [he] conjectures that robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them, have sex with them and even marry them…”It may sound a little weird, but it isn’t,” Levy said. “Love and sex with robots are inevitable.”
 

  To day, (I quote), “There are companies that already sell realistic sex dolls, “and it’s just a matter of adding some electronics to them to add some vibration,” he said, or endowing the robots with a few audio responses. “That’s fairly primitive in terms of robotics, but the technology is already there.”..

  An article from Reuters, “Japan’s lonely hearts turn to dolls for sex, company” provide further insight. (I quote).”Real love is hard to find for one Japanese man, who has transferred his affection and desires to dozens of plastic sex dolls.
When the 45-year-old, who uses a pseudonym of Ta-Bo, returns home, it’s not a wife or girlfriend who await him, but a row of dolls lined up neatly on his sofa.
  Each has a name. Ta-Bo often watches television with his toys before bathing them, powdering them so that their skin feels more human, dressing them in lingerie and then taking them to bed.
  “A human girl can cheat on you or betray you sometimes, but these dolls never do those thing. They belong to me 100 percent,” says the engineer who has spent more than 2 million yen ($16,000) over the past decade on the dolls
  “Sometimes it takes too much time before I can have sex with the person I meet. But with these dolls, it’s just a matter of a click of the mouse. With one click, they are delivered to you.”, see more here.

 

  Now Levy…” argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, “and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that’s programmable too.”…

  This may be the remedy for lonely man and women by letting them ‘buy a women’ embodied in “dolls”, programed to their special affinities and in the future with new legislation to married them and live in a new family form.

(I quote)…”My forecast [says Levy] is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots,” …” “Massachusetts is more liberal than most other jurisdictions in the United States and has been at the forefront of same-sex marriage,” Levy said. “There’s also a lot of high-tech research there at places like MIT.”,
 

  And finally, possible pro and con of getting married to a robot are perhaps,
(I quote)…”In a marriage or other relationship, one partner could be jealous or consider it infidelity if the other used a robot,” Levy said. “But who knows, maybe some other relationships could welcome a robot. Instead of a woman saying, ‘Darling, not tonight, I have a headache,’ you could get ‘Darling, I have a headache, why not use your robot?’ “, see here.