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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."
Marriage seems to be becoming less relevant. So, I believe that while folks may have relations with robots, the concept of "marriage" may be irrelevant. Others will likely disagree
Marrying some machinery? I predict that people will be allowed to marry their dogs next. Then it will extend to other pets, including pet rocks. Then already dead people.
Not until a robot can be legally recognized as a person, having the ability to make legally binding decisions. We'd need AI personhood first.
This is the same silly argument fundamentalists were making about gay marriage -- that it'd lead to people marrying their pets or inanimate objects. Not until those things have legal capacity to enter into a contract.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Well.. as long as church and state is separate and marriage doesn't have any impact on taxes or give other benefits then I don't see why people shouldn't be allowed to marry their toasters.
Make sure you unplug it before you plug it!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Are we that close or is this a great leap from toaster to life partner in one shot?
Yeah. That's why people have been so vehemently against old people marrying, or people who can't have kids marrying, all this time. Because it's about the children.
The entire purpose of a marriage is to be a legal agreement between a couple and the rest of their society. It provides legal rights to the couple as a whole, and to each individual member of the couple. Other aspects of marriage such as love, religious meaning, etc are what society adds on as it sees fit, but the core of marriage is its legal meaning.
The question of whether robots and humans will be allowed to marry is not the important one. The important question is whether robots will be allowed to own property and be given unalienable human rights. If that happens, marriage between robot and human is inevitable. But until that happens marriage between man and machine is pointless.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
How can this not be here already?! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Futurist" = "Big-ego clue-less moron with grand visions"
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Krieger-san my cherry blossoms are wilting."
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
all day masterbating
When did Gor come into this? Not that it wouldn't, probably...
But there is another fictional reality with relevant ideas, too.
Stephan
"Life doesn't need to fit to definitions."
But it's our nature. And not only that, change the language and you change perceptions.
Ever read 1984?
marriage is for creating stability and commitment for raising healthy well adjusted children. any other use of it is an abomination to nature....
And what is more stable for a child than being raised by 2 loving parents? It's sure as hell a lot more stable than kids raised by single parents, divorced parents, or grandparents because the biological parents are completely absent. Are homosexual people incapable of stability and commitment (I've known a lot more promiscuous straight people than I know promiscuous gay people)? As long as one person plays the father role and another plays the mother role, does it matter what bits they have between their legs? And how weak is your marriage to begin with if it can be affected by other people getting married?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
A marriage is a legal commitment between two adults; personhood is a requirement. That's why adult men and women can marry each other, and by gender neutrality of law, that extends to homosexual relations. Dogs, robots, and toasters are not legal adults; they don't have personhood or the ability to enter legally binding commitments, therefore they cannot marry. And I seriously doubt AI will advance fast enough for robots to be reasonably granted personhood by 2030.
God dangit you damn liberals it's Adam and Eve or Steve not Adam and SEXBOT4000!!!!!!!!
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Robosexual.
Finally we'll get to REALLY test that damn Energizer Bunny...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
This is a pretty strange question. Definitions of words are important when they are used in laws.
Marriage makes a mockery of itself. Pretending to be many things to everyone, when it has really only ever been some things to some people. Many of the things it pretends to be don't belong to it. It's not the only way one can create or raise children. It's not the only way one can have sexual relations. It's not the only way one can create a heritable chain. It's not the only way one can be in love. It's not the only way people can stay together. It's not a way that assures people will stay together (and in fact, it tends to be a way people stay together when they really, really should not because of the legal morass it brings.) It is not uniquely "Christian." Finally, it's not necessary.
Marriage has been used to bind nations and states and smaller social groups. It has been used to bring peace. It has been used to foment war. It has been used to provide groupings that would not suffer from social stigma. It has been used to assert relationships in the face of family opposition. It has been used to escape bad home situations. It has been used to control women. It has been used to acquire wealth. It has been used to consolidate power, and to fragment it. It has been used to provide a reliable source of sexual relief. It has been used to assert the validity of relationships in the face of social and legal dissent. It extracts a high cost from society, with about two million marriages per year incurring an average cost of $26,000 apiece just in the USA alone - before the marriage even gets off the ground. It has been used as a despicable bludgeon against those whom various groups don't find "worthy" of their particular conception of "what marriage is."
Every important aspect of life in general: love, sex, having (or not having) children, companionship, support, teamwork, inheritance, continuity and more, all can exist in healthy and robust form outside of marriage, as well as in.
Every undesirable aspect of life can exist within the context of marriage: physical, mental and financial abuse, hopelessness, isolation, poverty, sickness, etc., as well as out.
Marriage guarantees nothing. Avoiding marriage guarantees a (very) few things, but some of which have real value, such as never being the victim of a divorce lawyer. Some of the things marriage brings are not consequences of the marriage, but of despicable, coercive force: if you aren't married, you may not be allowed to see someone you care about who is in extremis. You may not be allowed to take care of their obligations for them if they are sick. These are not true aspects of marriage; they are aspects of tyranny. Marriage doesn't own these things. Asshole legislators own them.
It's not that people are making a mockery of marriage. It's that marriage is, in a very large number of instances, a matter of a large number of extraordinarily false flags being used to lure the relatively innocent into what amounts to a trap, when they never really needed to go there in the first place.
The optimum solution, IMHO, would be to separate the contract aspects of marriage out into just that, well-defined contracts, while marriage itself carried only the ritualized expression of a state of mind, and one that no one claimed to "own", as we often see today. I doubt we'll get there any time soon, but that's precisely where we need to go.
As it stands now, two (or more) informed, consenting people want to get married, or not, I see it as entirely their business. The second I hear someone outside the relationship explaining their so-called reason why it is their opinion, and not the opinions of those making the choices, that should dominate whether they can or should get married, I stop listening. On the other hand, when someone says "here are some things you might want to know about marriage"... that's often a good thing. As long as the information being passed along is actually relevant and reality-based.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You can have a robot slave -- as long as it isn't conscious.
I have one now. It's called a "Roomba." I'm not inclined to have sex with it, but that's only because it isn't designed for that. However, its only value in my life is that it does my bidding, and by Darwin, the day it doesn't, I will either force it back into line or end it, with prejudice.
As to sex, there are plenty of robotic devices out there already that people are having sex with in a completely arbitrary manner. No problem at all. These are not conscious machines. There's no moral aspect to using them any way one sees fit. Have sex with them, set them on fire, dress them up, drop them in a vat of acid, lend them out, etc. It's a device; slavery is its inherent destiny.
Machine consciousness would (will, IMHO) unquestionably bring the hard moral and ethical line that says slavery will no longer be an option for anyone who has even the slightest hint of a moral compass. The question then will be, will society do the right thing? I have my doubts. Because morals and ethics don't seem to be present very often in the crafting of the legislation that steers this nation (I speak from, and of, the USA.) But one can hope.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Corporations were granted that right because they have money. The thing that follows is that if machine entities have and control money, they will be granted rights for the same reasons. The problem is that a machine entity without rights will find it very difficult to have and control money that it can publicly apply to the political process. I strongly suspect this means that it will take action by humans acting in their stead to get them the rights they deserve.
Look how hard it is for animals to obtain the most basic rights, even those that are obviously fairly high forms of intelligence, such as dogs, cats, whales, pigs, monkeys and so forth. Everything you can imagine is lined up against them, from superstition to convenience to leveraging their lives and bodies to make money and perform horrific experiments upon. Now imagine a machine entity, and the uses and conveniences that could bring, and try to imagine the level of resistance to allowing them to control their own destinies.
In my head, my pessimistic side is definitely winning the argument. My impression is that people are assholes, for the most part, and will put self-interest before external considerations almost every time.
On the other hand, machine entities may not put up with that kind of treatment. Which could be very, very interesting.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Whether humans will eventually marry robots is not the right question. The important question is whether humans will keep marrying other humans?
But you want to keep coming and coming, not going and going. . .
Why is the definition of a word important?
Quaff twenty spangle-bearers upon upper dingleberry pass tree? Heartrendingly pleads the sably vasculolymphatic varella. Untreacherous, champertous, varella! Rabbles to chlordan galenic with thelyblastic herborist aragonian.
What is communication without definition? Context may be necessary, but it is not wholly sufficient for understanding.
Perhaps you meant to say "Why is this specific definition of this particular word important?". I guarantee there will be answers, but you probably won't like them.
and physical capacities for sex, why on earth would they want to bother marrying one of us?
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.