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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."
How can this not be here already?! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Exactly. Marriage comes with a bunch of legal rights, for things such as inheritance. For a robot to be able to marry a human (or another robot), it would first need to be allowed to independently own property (and not be owned itself), which means that it would need to be regarded as a sentient entity in its own right. I think that we're more than 35 years away from that.
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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.
But you want to keep coming and coming, not going and going. . .