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Humans Marrying Robots? Experts Say It's Really Coming (fortune.com)
If you were rooting for fictitious chatacters Dolores and William to make it work on HBO's Westworld, just wait a few more decades and their relationship may be able to exist in real life. That's right, a few experts say marriage will be legal between humans and robots by 2050. From a report on Fortune: At a conference last week called "Love and Sex with Robots" at Goldsmith University in London, David Levy, author of a book on human-robot love, made the bold prediction. And while some other experts were skeptical, Adrian Cheok, a professor at City University London and director of the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore, supported Levy's idea. "That might seem outrageous because it's only 35 years away. But 35 years ago people thought homosexual marriage was outrageous," Cheok said. "Until the 1970s, some states didn't allow white and black people to marry each other. Society does progress and change very rapidly."
Robosexual.
I would also add that marriage makes it easier for institutions and government to define a "family" unit. Hospital visitations, child custody, sign for risky procedures, etc. The non-trivial interactions a family has with various institutions that provide some rights to immediate family members.
It's quick and easy to ask "are you related (by marriage) to the incapacitated" instead of "are you a signatory of the Family Unit Definitions form section C part IV or are you listed in the Accepted Relatives of Consent for Medical Procedures as listed in section E part III.
Even the ragged-ass so-called AI (it's not AI, there's decidedly no "I")
Don't confuse AI with MI. AI is the study of how to automate things that it currently takes intelligence to do - without needing intelligence. AI researchers frequently succeed at this. Almost everything on the wishlist of AI researches in the 60s and 70s is now a solved problem.
Machine intelligence is real intelligence/sapience/consciousness/self-awareness/whatever. Just running on metal instead of meat. It might happen by accident as a side-effect of AI research, though I'm highly skeptical. It might emerge spontaneously (the entirety of the internet is certainly as complex as the human brain). But almost no one is researching this, since there's no economic point in doing so.
Certainly for a sexbot you'd want AI, not MI. If you can't program it with a desired set of behaviors, then what's the point?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.