Bloody Hell
Someone's been reading too much Isaac Asimov!
Despite the popularity of Real Dolls etc, I think human-robot intermarriage is not particulatly likely . As has been pointed out, in order for "marriage" to have any meaning, both parties have to be equal, which means the robots would have to have true intelligence and be accorded the same basic rights as a living being.
And if that were the case - that the robots were true AIs and deemed to be a lifeform in their own right - what is the guarantee that they will find humans "attractive" enough to marry?
Seriously. You could build the robot to be a veritable Adonis or Venus (with the arms this time) so that the average media-brainwashed human is filled with lust and desires to bonk it senseless. You could fit it with appropriate parts to make bonking possible. You could eventually endow the robot with intellect enough to stimulate the mind of the most picky lover (and qualify it as an intelligent life form deserving of "human rights" including the right to marry whomever it pleases). I presume that if you've got AI licked, you've got emotion sorted as well - otherwise it would not truly be a life form - so this hypothetical future robot would "feel" happy, sad, angry, scared (and that mish-mash of all the above that we call "love")
But where's the guarantee it is going to find a *human being* sexually attractive or emotionally/mentally stimulating?
In Asimov's "Robots of Dawn", one robot was bonking a chick because she was lonely and the old First Law kicked in so he fucked her to prevent the "harm" of loneliness and rejection. Of course, his big fulfillment was the joy of obeying the first law.
Talk about the ultimate "sympathy fuck".
So, if we want to marry robots in the future we're going to have to subsume the free will of an intelligent creature using something like the three laws - of course, once we do that, it is no longer a living creature but merely a better grade of vibrator or Real Doll and all the work that went into creating artificial intelligence goes down the toilet.
I mean, come on, robots do not procreate or evolve by themselves. They have no genetic code to mix-n-match to determine their appearance. We're talking about machines built by humans FOR humans, designed to look attractive to humans, have components designed to mimic those that give pleasure to humans (robots certainly don't need them, they don't procreate sexually) and presumably are wired to give the robot some form of pleasure so that it will desire to use those components in the service of humankind and then the robots would have to be "socially conditioned" (programmed) to find humans attractive (just as we are conditioned to view aspects of other humans as attractive - but that's natural for us) - we're talking a machine deliberately created to be a sex toy for a human being, irrespective of how much you dress it up with intelligence.
Free will? Not if its "education" revolved around conditioning it to be excited by humans.
What practical use is genitalia to a robot? For us: procreation, waste disposal and pleasure. For a robot? Giving pleasure to a human. Gee, nice to know the robot has a choice and is a free and intelligent creature, not just something built to satisfy the whims of humankind.
Unless the robot can turn around and say "Fuck off, I'd rather sit in the corner and stimulate this bit of tackle you gave me all by myself or stick it in another robot than fuck one of you ugly stupid humans" it is not going to pass any meaningful test of intelligence and free will. And if it does pass that test, then I can foresee robots bonking and "marrying" their own kind rather than humans.
Oh, and Lloyd Wilson: Calm down. The tone of the article is completely disparaging of the ideas promoted by the boffins and the repetition of that quote in the by-line highlights the stupidity of the concept rather than denigrates other races or homosexuals.
It is there to highlight how fucking out of touch the "egghead" is. You know that it is different from inter-racial marriage, I know it, Mr Page knows it. The one who doesn't seem to grasp the simple reality is the egg-head who made the pronouncement.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
