The Future of Love and Sex - Robots

nem75 writes "The New York Times has a review of British AI researcher David Levy's book 'Love and Sex with Robots'. He claims that within a span of about 50 years the day will come when people could actually fall in love with life-like robots. While this may seem far fetched at first, he has some pretty interesting views. 'He begins with what scientists know about why humans fall in love with other humans. There are 10 factors, he writes, including mystery, reciprocal liking, and readiness to enter a relationship. Why can't these factors apply to robots, too?' The case he builds goes much further though, and certainly provides food for thought." Update: 12/14 16:16 GMT by Z : This article is very similar to a discussion we had recently.

Comments

Re:From Agnes - With Love

[Bombula]

evolutionary psychology is pseudoscientific bullshit. For it to be a successful science, it would have to be able to make correct predictions about things the answers to which were not already known.

By your lights, scientific inquiry into human behavior is impossible. But I'll be charitable enough to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn't actually mean anything so asinine as to suggest that science can only be useful as a process of discovery and not as a means of explaining and predicting the phenomena we observe.

It is clear that evolutionary biology offers by far the best platform for explaining human behavior currently available to scientific inquiry. It's validity as the force that shaped not only our bodies but our minds and therefore our behavior is absolutely undisputed in the scientific community, despite your ignorant histrionics bandying about the pejorative term 'pseudoscience'. As for our ability to test hypotheses and explain observations, you're obviously unaware of the studies in evolutionary behavior that confirm predictions made about humans by evolutionary theory that are NOT readily apparent via observation but in fact are only borne out by statistical analysis across large populations. You're obviously not aware of all of the findings predicted by evolutionary behavior theory that run contrary to intuition and common sense, which are again borne out only by statistical analysis. And you're obviously not aware of studies that have made observations in other species, both closely and distantly related to humans, that again make predictions about human behavior that are unintuitive but are nevertheless confirmed by statistical analysis.

To give just one example, studies of eating habits in primates and other mammals as well as humans showed that omnivorous species avoided meat during the first stages of pregnancy. This gelled with observations of morning sickness in humans, and led to a prediction that certain chemicals conducive to bacterial and parasitic pathogens would provoke aversion in humans. This in turn led to the prediction that early during pregnancy the female body enters a state of immunosuppression. These predictions, which emerged directly from evolutionary behavior theory, were confirmed in studies of human populations.

So while you're wallowing in the cool muck of your own ignorance, there are a few of us out here doing actual science. If you don't care to join us, or at least read about what we do, then it'd be better for everyone if you clapped that opinionated and woefully uninformed trap of yours shut.