Love, Sex, and Androids*

AI (Artificial intelligence) researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands recently completed his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships.

His work reminds me of "The Caves of Steel", from Asimov, where Elijah Baley, the human detective, and R. Daneel Olivaw his number 2 robot detective, introduce in 1954 the story of an human-robot relationship bearing a great likelihood to what Levy today proposes. In his thesis, "Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners", he conjectures that robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them, have sex with them and even marry them. "It may sound a little weird, but it isn't," Levy said. "Love and sex with robots are inevitable."

David Levy argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. "For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love is similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that's programmable too."

"My forecast [says Levy] is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," "Massachusetts is more liberal than most other jurisdictions in the United States and has been at the forefront of same-sex marriage," Levy said. "There's also a lot of high-tech research there at places like MIT."

The ideas put forward in his thesis and his forthcoming book "Love and Sex with ROBOTS"** have generated plenty of debate and controversy recently in the AI community. Theoretically, being an android will be harder, better, smarter, faster and stronger than us, and I believe it is unlikely that humanity will win this evolutionary contest. However, regardless of all interesting questions fraught with ethical overtones that you may think of, the question we should be asking today is, with organic reproduction seemingly out of the way, how do we get as much humanity into these androids before it's too late?, and in this particular case, while the idea of an AI sophisticated enough to create a functional sex partner is possible, will the meaning of relationships over time turn into another lifestyle upgrade?... good stuff that kept me amused while going to University on a few mornings this last week or two.

Despite the fact progress is being made all around us towards this future, very few people find a cyborg future palatable. Our attitudes of defensive competitiveness currently force robots to conform to a harmless shape and substance (except for military robots but remember we are talking about consumer robots). That attitude disappears if we begin to identify with the android. People are still too complacent with the idea that we are -years away- from merging with our machine counterparts because they mistakenly believe that we have to understand a lot more about how the brain works to interface with it. They hold the false idea that we need to duplicate, or at least completely model brain function before we can work with it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Take any real wetware type of story available on the Internet, where real scientists attempt to merge neurons with silicon, and the awesome neuroplasticity of the human brain becomes self-evident. Neurons by their very nature process signals and identify patterns and they don't care where the signals come from!

At any rate, on the more amusing side of things though, I began to feel that why spend many years developing what nature does infinitely better!?

*Androids: an automaton that resembles a human being, human-robot.
** For a full review of David Levy's book, check the 10 November edition of New Scientist magazine, or log in to New Scientist Article Preview here.

P.S. I might be lucky enough to see David Levy during this SGAI Conference and Forum for Research Students on Artificial Intelligence which is being held in the University of Cambridge on December 10 - 12.

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