The story from Ananova says it all:
“A British scientist has been awarded a doctorate for a paper predicting that humans will one day marry robots. Maastricht University awarded David Levy a PhD for a thesis entitled Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners. The thesis examines human attitudes toward affection, love and sexuality and concluded that the findings are just as applicable to human interaction with robots of the future as they are to relationships between humans of today.”
This may not be exclusively an idea of the future: a German inventor says he has already developed a robot with full sexual functionality.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Greg // Oct 16, 2007 at 9:45 pm
John, as a reader of Wired I’m surprised you didn’t catch this one, the Sex Life of Robots video here…. http://www.wired.com/culture/art/multimedia/2007/10/video_robotsex
2 John // Oct 17, 2007 at 10:05 am
Greg- Thanks for that! This is a topic Nick Bostrom may have been interested in, as a transhumanist. The far future (as presented in science fiction like Spielberg’s A.I. maybe) might actually be a world populated by silicon-based rather than carbon-based lifeforms. In that case the only reason for sex would be a form of adherence to the standards us humans passed along.
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