By Neil Eldred
If you thought tempers flared during the recent marriage equality battles, just wait.
Things are bound to get hotter during the robot marriage war.
That’s right. Robot marriage. And we’re not talking robots marrying robots.
Complex.com reports on a woman, named Lilly, who identifies herself as robosexual. She has no interest in men or women partners, and she is only attracted to robots. Her desire is to marry her robot, which she made herself. She’s just waiting for France to legalize the union.
At a conference called “Love and Sex with Robots” David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robos, and
Marriage Between Human and Robot: Closer than You Think
Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots, said Lilly won’t have to wait too long for robot-human marriages. “The future has a habit of
laughing at you,” he said. “If you think love and sex with robots is not going to happen in your lifetime, I think you’re wrong. The first human robot marriages will take place around the year 2050 or sooner but not longer.”
One academic who supported Levy’s idea was Adrian Cheok. “That might seem outrageous because it’s only 35 years away” Cheok said. “But 35 years ago, people thought homosexual marriage was outrageous. Until the 1970s, some states didn’t allow white and black people to marry each other. Society does progress and changes very rapidly.”
Robots and Free Will?
But amongst the debates and sensational claims, one question seemed to be missing: Does the robot have free will to enter, or reject, the relationship?
We have no idea how far artificial intelligence will advance in 32 years. We might think today that we can program the robot to want to satisfy our every sexual fantasy.
What if, however, artificial intelligence evolves to the point where the robot is disgusted by the idea of sex with a human? What if robots evolve with free will?
Free will is possible among robots. “Free will can arise from the interaction of two algorithmic systems because this can create choice.” And robots will have multi-algorithmic systems. And thus a primitive source of free will.
True, this is not as complex as our own free will, but it’s enough to give pause to replacing human partners with humanoid robots.
Because isn’t that what we’re doing? Replacing all that messy give and take and human to human frustrations with something we can totally control?
But we may find that control to be elusive.
Or we may find, to our horror, that we are not the ones in control anymore.
Do you think robots will have free will in 33 years? Tell us about it in the comments.
You gotta read the robot trilogy of Asimov. You’d love it in the context of this post. He sets forth his 3 laws of robotics, which most everyone copied thereafter, including people building REAL robots. Good sci-fi writers, they are the ones who predict and shape the future. The rest write dimestore mysteries.
The Caves of Steel
The Naked Sun
The Robots of Dawn
The Foundation series, another famous Asimov invention, predicted what Facebook is doing with data. He called it Psychohistory then. Choosing initial conditions specific enough with the right model that could predict the future. Marketing using people’s data is a cheap trick. Figuring out who supports what candidate is powerful. Facebook can tell a woman is pregnant based on her clicking and reading even before she knows herself.
Yeah Asimov is the boss.