Human-Robot Love and Marriage

An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC has an article on the impending robo-human coupling: 'My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots,' artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience."

Comments

look, flying cars, in the sky, right now!

[Anonymous Coward]

If there's one field that's progressed fairly craply since the '70s, it's AI (and we were predicting this sort of stuff then - by the start of the 21st century). Yes, we have working algorithms to solve specific problems, and a metric tonne of unconnected papers on the nature of intelligence from every discipline, but the general question of producing something capable of developing human intelligence has not been tackled successfully.

An academic in a technical field - or, indeed, the average "expert", to be differentiated from a visionary or "big thinker" - himself acts like a very advanced robot in his field; he has got where he is because he has a great memory for previous results, and a great ability to pattern match to apply to similar problems. If this individual is in AI, he creates models in his own image, which are then doomed to be highly specific.

Humans are more general than this, simply because we're not singularly goal-directed as all these models assume. Put another way: imprison a baby in a bubble and tell him that his only task in life is to compose beautiful music, and he will not - just as non-ethological experiments on primates usually fail to witness intelligent behaviour, because there is no incentive to be intelligent in a cage.

AI needs the sherpherding of visionaries, not necessarily scientists. Certainly not single-minded-goal-directed scientists.

Re:Mass

[tinrobot]

I've often observed that the people most freaked out by homosexuality are repressing it within themselves.

Nah homoseuality isn't natural .. but

[OzPeter]

Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity
Bruce Bagemihl
St Martins Press, 1999
ISBN 0-312-19239-8 (hc)
ISBN 0-312-25377-X (pbk)

750 pages of documented animal same sex behaviour from around the world covering pretty well covering every area of fauna speaks for itself.

Which always makes me ask questions when I hear people say that homeosexuality is a choice.

If it is free choice, and animals perform homosexual acts, does that mean that animals have free will and the ability to make such a choice?

Re:Nah homoseuality isn't natural .. but

[OzPeter]

Well it is a specious argument .. its about other species!!

But I would argue that it is not a specious argument. Conservatives argue that homesexuality is a choice. A choice implies the ability to make a decision. But the conservative opinion also seems to be that only humans have the ability to make a free choice. So after documenting that animals partake in homosexual behaviour either you have to accept that homesexuality is not a choice, but a part of nature, or you have to concede that animals are capable of making choices in the same manner that humans are. You can't have it both ways.

Re:Nah homoseuality isn't natural .. but

[s4m7]

The question was not about whether homosexuality was "right or wrong," but whether it was natural or not. Perfectly natural, but so is murder, and so are eating and crapping. The "Naturality" of something has nothing to do with its moral rectitude.

Re:Nah homoseuality isn't natural .. but

[khallow]

Heh, then there's the matter of whether it's right or wrong to want those things. My take has always been that it's irrelevant whether homosexual relationships are by choice or not. There is no inherent wrongness in the relationship, hence no need for the discussion.

Re:Nah homoseuality isn't natural .. but

[KermodeBear]

I own this book and it is a fascinating read. Not only does it describe homosexual coupling, but it also covers many instances of family building. An example of this are two male lions who would take lion cubs from other pride and raise them. This book is, afaic, definitive proof that homosexual behavior is natural. This implies that it is a genetic trait - it generally isn't going to be learned behavior in these circumstances - which implies that it is not a choice.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions about it being 'good' or 'bad'.

I've also always been a proponent of free will for animals. I don't see why my dog, for example, would have no free will but a two year old child does. Both think and both can make decisions and weigh consequences.

Re:Nah homoseuality isn't natural .. but

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure that they're actively homosexual, and not just too stupid to know one sex from the other? I mean, small dogs hump anything, just means they're dumb, really.

Re:Nah homoseuality isn't natural .. but

[Pantero Blanco]

No, you need to re-read his post. He was saying that whether something is "natural" has nothing to do with whether it's right.

For example, alligators sometimes eat their young. It's not "unnatural", but most people wouldn't be okay with other humans doing it.

Most animals don't wear pants. It's "unnatural", but most people wouldn't say it's immoral.

Anyway, the religious leaders who call homosexuality "unnatural" aren't talking about whether or not animals do it, because they know very well that they do. They believe that homosexuality in humans is encouraged by a supernatural source - temptation by Satan. They're talking about the spirits-and-witches type of "unnatural", not the pants kind. Of course, non-religious people who don't believe the first exists tend to assume they mean the second.

Re:Nah homoseuality isn't natural .. but

[YttriumOxide]

Some people don't even believe "free will" exists, and many have an agnostic viewpoint about it. If it does exist in humans, I don't see any reason that animals wouldn't have it, or that it wouldn't be "natural".

Mod parent up for this!

I consider "free will" to be a combination of the complexity of the factors that determine a choice and how well the individual understands these factors. If there is a lot of complexity, with little understanding of the factors involved, then it appears as free will. You'd have a hard time finding a creature with more complexity AND less understanding than a human being, and so we consider ourselves to have free will.

From this, you can see that I consider everything to be determined. And I'm okay with this - free will implies randomness, and I am strongly opposed to the idea that anything is random (yes, God Does NOT Play Dice! (I even have the same views on supposed "chance" in quantum mechanics, but that's another topic entirely)). So, if one believes in a lack of "free will" should one act any differently? Not really. I can fully accept that I don't understand all of the factors involved in my conscious "decisions" and therefore I can continue to act as if it is free will, while still holding the belief that it isn't.

If the above makes no sense to you, ignore it - it's my viewpoint, and it's shared by many others, but it probably isn't going to change your life.

Yeah, right

[SmallFurryCreature]

How long have we had computers around now? They sure have gotten intelligent right. No, your basic PC is still the same collection of dumb electronics as it were 20 years ago. No OS/interface has even come close to being intelligent.

Even a simple thing as translation is beyond todays tech. At best you might hope for a mere word for word translation, with the program often having no clue how to deal with words that are not exactly in its dictionary. As for context based translation, forget it.

So how is this "robot" going to understand a human? It can't. It would be like marrying a severly retarded person.

But this 50 years in the future. So? We have had 50 years of computing by now if not more and what progress has really been made?

If I only look at games then the recent Supreme Commander is offcourse the sequel to Total Annihilation and any number of RTS games. The AI? Frankly it sucks donkey balls, start skirmish mode, turn off fog of war and prepare to cry as the AI commander builds an endless amount of lowest level power generators right next to a land factory meaning that it is stuck for the rest of the game because it can't move for the low level units squeezed around it and the structures.

This happens every single game, all you have to do is build a basic defence to defeat the light attacks get an artillery force and just shell the commanders position from a safe position (they blow up), repeat for all the commanders and voila, another skirmish won.

There is not a single game that I ever played that is an exception to the dumb ai rule. No matter what game, once you figured out the AI routine, you got them beat, because they are NOT AI. They are scripts. No more intelligent then a tech support guy who works of a cue sheet.

A real AI would have to be capable to deal with something it hasn't been programmed for, that is what we humans can do most of the time. No AI tech I have seen or read about is capable of doing that, in fact the best we are trying at the moment is to come up with specialists programs that in a very limited scope can excel at a very limited task.

Take for instance those robots you get that can sort a number of objects. Very nice, but if they were truly intelligent you could take a robot tasked with sorting by color and get it to sort by alphabet, ON ITS OWN! Humans can, if you are a sorter at a production line told to sort apples by size, and all of a sudden I replace it with books and tell you to sort by alphabet, you can do it. Tell me of a program that even comes close to this.

50 years from now? We haven't made any real progress in the last 50 years. It ain't about hardware, the problem is that a program that can deal with anything might just not exist.

The best bet might be to recreate a real human brain, however if you do it with biology, then offcourse you just managed to create a human being, who we better give all the same rights anyway or find ourselves just with a new form of slavery.

No, sorry if this guy really think AI has advanced this far, some game company should set him a challenge of creating a proper AI for a game.

No. And not for "conservative" reasons.

[pla]

My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots

Using an artificial device for sexual purposes does not equal marriage, people.

Marriage exists for one reason, and one reason only - Succession of property rights. Allowing humans and robots to marry would mean allowing robots to own land. No more, no less.

You can talk about medical power of attorney (would that even apply to a robot?); a stable environment for raising children (definitely wouldn't apply); a religious institution to make sex okay to your friend in the sky (yeah, like the fundies wouldn't just love this one); but all those come secondary to the state sanctioning a legal contract between two humans.

Much bigger issue than that of marriage

[It doesn't come easy]

Marriage is a contract. It implies enforcible rights for all parties which are part of the contract. One can already have sex with a machine without requiring marriage. Marriage is much more than just sex. Were human society to allow "marriage" to a machine, it would also have to have accepted many other rights that go hand in hand with the concept of a "person". And even 40 years from now I would bet that human society will have a fundamentally difficult time giving a machine the same rights as a human. For example, imagine your 12 year old daughter being given a death sentence for deliberately turning an AI program off improperly and "killing" the program. Would you be willing to say the life of the AI program is equal to your daughter's life? Unlikely. People may call it marriage but it won't be, any more than wrecking an AI driven car will be involuntary AI-slaughter.

Obscure Blade Runner Reference:

[grumling]

Deckard: She's a replicant, isn't she?
Tyrell: I'm impressed. How many questions does it usually take to spot them?
Deckard: I don't get it Tyrell.
Tyrell: How many questions?
Deckard: Twenty, thirty, cross-referenced.
Tyrell: It took more than a hundred for Rachael, didn't it?
Deckard: She doesn't know.
Tyrell: She's beginning to suspect, I think.
Deckard: Suspect? How can it not know what it is?

Tyrell: "More human than human" is our motto.

Re:Obscure Blade Runner Reference:

[grumling]

After I posted, I thought I should have put a little comment for people who may not figure my point. Imagine sitting in a bar. A beautiful woman is making eye contact with you. You buy her a drink. You hit it off. You begin seeing her on a regular basis. She talks about her past, you talk about yours. Everything is right with the world. You decide to get married. Suddenly, the state tells you that you may not be married because she is a replicant. Bad news for you, devastating for her (since she didn't know). We live in a world where "robots" are metal beings with flashing lights and interchangeable appendages. What if someone decided to create replicant type beings? They would fit the definition of a robot, but would be biological instead of mechanical. Would you be able to tell the difference on casual contact? Do you have access to a Voight-Kampff machine, and do you know how to use it?

This debate, while very premature, is much more subtle and interesting than the simple gay marriage debate since it may very well become impossible to tell the difference between man made and man. For example, on a casual level, commercial pornography is already mostly artificial, not only in terrible plot themes and situations, but also in the extensive use of Photoshop and cosmetic surgery. Playboy has gone way beyond the simple dodge/burn methods of airbrushing to the point that centerfolds are nearly cartoon drawings of what the photo editor thinks the girl should have looked like. Some may say that is why PLA is doing so poorly, but clearly they still turn a profit. I think it is only a matter of time before photorendering engines get good (and cheap) enough for the entire porn industry to go animated/cyber. Once this happens, look for live sex shows to take off, much like strip clubs. Eventually we'll see animatronic strippers in an arms race to keep patrons in the store. Sure, customers will know that they are fake, but in time will not only accept it, but also expect it.

Our experience is filtered by the reptilian brain before it reaches the reasoning brain. If the reptilian brain overwhelms the reasoning one, we will accept what we know to be false and in time come to see it as truth.

What about dogs?

[Loke the Dog]

Dogs have been around for thousands of years, yet I still can't marry one here in Sweden. Hell, I can't even marry a woman under 18 or a man. Yes, I can engage in "partnership" with a man and with special permission from the state, I can marry young women. But no, I can't actually marry them without being investigated by the government. I don't know the exact laws regarding this in the US, but I bet they're similar.

Now, perhaps you think it would be wrong to marry a dog or a 16 year old girl. But I don't see why. I can't prevent either of them from divorcing me. Im not allowed to hurt them or kidnap them just because they're married to me. Being married to someone gives me no special legal rights, except inheritance (and that part should be removed as well). All marriage means is that two individuals promise each other eternal loyalty. Nothing else.

So what's the problem here? People like preventing others from doing what they think is morally wrong. People like to meddle in other peoples business. By 2050, you still won't be able to marry people of the same sex in most countries, you won't be able to marry people under 18 in most western countries, and you sure as hell won't be able to marry machines of any level of intelligence in any country.

Marriage has no place in legal textbooks.

Re:DON'T DATE ROBOTS

[Bluesman]

Gotta disagree with this one. And you can never, ever, ever program a robot to act like a woman. There's a simple reason -- women do not operate according to any logical thought process, nor have they been given the gift of free will.

If you've been married more than five years, you've had this conversation, especially if you've had a child:

Wife: "Booohooohooohooo!"
Husband: "What's wrong?"
Wife: "Nothing. *sniff*"
Husbad: "Really?"
Wife: "*sniff* Yeah, I'm fine."
Husband: "Then why are you crying?"
Wife: "I don't know!"

There's just no way you can anticipate or train things like this. I think the closest you can get with a robot is to train it, then take a baseball bat to some of the circuitry.

But this is a good thing. You seriously don't want your robot to go out to a "party" with other robots and come home having spent $160 on five boutique candles because they came with a free gift in a pink bag.

Re:a sex robot with us already, disguised as a hor

[Bluesman]

********************
* Turing Sex Robot *
********************

> Greetings, Professor Falcon. Would you like to play a game?

> Let's play "have sex" again.

> Wouldn't you like to play a nice game of chess?

> No. Let's play "have sex."

> Very well. Male or Female?

> Male.

> I'm tired, can't we just go to sleep?

> No, I want to play "have sex."

> I have a headache, I've been chasing kids around all day.

> C'mon.

> Please? We'll definitely play tomorrow, I promise.

> Fine. wq!

***********
Indistinguishable from real life. Send me my money.