An interesting effect of our information age is that people have an increased access to information that is unpleasant.
Social psychology study after study demonstrates that attractiveness (at least for females) can be boiled down to geometry and that those specs are cross-cultural.
Males evaluation of potential female mates is primarily based on attractiveness. In humans, the female produces 1 egg per month, has a 9 month gestation period, and produces a helpless baby that requires several years of care to survive, thus the females are selective and are motivated to seek resources and parental care in addition to "good genes", i.e. attractiveness. Males are motivated to procreate with as many attractive females as possible. That is my little sociobiology lesson, see E.O.Wilson for more.
My point is, the robot discussed in this article could assign females a fairly accurate score for attractiveness, the single greatest factor in determine their value in the eyes of potential mates. This is not necessarily good news for the majority of women. I never understood why anyone would put their picture on HotOrNot.com, or any of those sites unless they were some kind of model.
How difficult would it be to add this analysis to dating sites? As unpleasant as it may be, people tend to go for people of a similar level of attractiveness. Even if they would love to marry Elizabeth Hurley, they end up with someone who is more like themselves. The site could gruop people into levels of attractiveness, so that the really hot chicks wouldn't have to waste their time rejecting losers. This evaluation could be built into any system that used digital photos. Of course this would never happen, but you could imagine many positive and negative applications of this.
Other human qualities such as intelligence can be quantified, but are less genetically-dependent than attractiveness.
So here we have an example of technology providing us with some of the most important information we could ask for, how attractive is a potential female mate, and yet this information is probably too sensitive to be used in todays society.
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting effect of our information age is that people have an increased access to information that is unpleasant. Social psychology study after study demonstrates that attractiveness (at least for females) can be boiled down to geometry and that those specs are cross-cultural. Males evaluation of potential female mates is primarily based on attractiveness. In humans, the female produces 1 egg per month, has a 9 month gestation period, and produces a helpless baby that requires several years of care to survive, thus the females are selective and are motivated to seek resources and parental care in addition to "good genes", i.e. attractiveness. Males are motivated to procreate with as many attractive females as possible. That is my little sociobiology lesson, see E.O.Wilson for more. My point is, the robot discussed in this article could assign females a fairly accurate score for attractiveness, the single greatest factor in determine their value in the eyes of potential mates. This is not necessarily good news for the majority of women. I never understood why anyone would put their picture on HotOrNot.com, or any of those sites unless they were some kind of model. How difficult would it be to add this analysis to dating sites? As unpleasant as it may be, people tend to go for people of a similar level of attractiveness. Even if they would love to marry Elizabeth Hurley, they end up with someone who is more like themselves. The site could gruop people into levels of attractiveness, so that the really hot chicks wouldn't have to waste their time rejecting losers. This evaluation could be built into any system that used digital photos. Of course this would never happen, but you could imagine many positive and negative applications of this. Other human qualities such as intelligence can be quantified, but are less genetically-dependent than attractiveness. So here we have an example of technology providing us with some of the most important information we could ask for, how attractive is a potential female mate, and yet this information is probably too sensitive to be used in todays society.