zoe williams wonders if geeks are emotionally equipped to programme robots to love |
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I remember reading a piece about Asperger's syndrome, and a female sufferer - well, I call her a sufferer, though she seemed rather sanguine about it - said: "Some people have to be like us, otherwise nothing would get done. You lot would just stand around chatting all day."
I bring this up just to point out that geeks are different from us, chums. David Levy for one is different from us. He starts his discussion of Love and Sex with Robots with a light and diverting preamble on early robotics, but pretty soon he's lost me - not in all the dense complexity (that comes later), but by drawing a distinction between a duck robot that is actually excreting, and a duck robot whose poo is a hoax. Hoax, I'm thinking. Who cares? What on earth could it matter? You could still get better duck shit off an actual duck.
Anyway, I am of course wrong - this book, |
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or any other enquiry like it, is not about robots. You talk about love and sex with robots, and you ask whether or not it's possible: but as soon as you've asked that, you're really asking: What is love? What is sex? Those two questions alone could occupy a lifetime, before you've even mooted a connection.
The factors militating against sexbots are these: that love is whimsical and unpredictable, that it is founded on challenge, that we can only feel it for an object we can't control, that it shuns convenience, that it flourishes only in the loony conditions thrown up by the unique and unknowable personality of a person.
You would be foolish to throw all this at a geek, even if you believe it, which I do. He will be able to disprove you with research, which shows love to be prosaic, based mainly on how often you see a person, until you've seen them too much, and then it lasts mainly because you don't...
I have a two-pennys worth to throw in here, however. I had one of those Sony  |
Penetrating the pride and prejudice of Islam
The boy robot
