Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
self-seeking or easily angered, unless of course you want them to be. In
short, your robot spouse will be everything you want of him (or her).
(S)he can be made in whatever likeness you wish, a Gwyneth Paltrow,
Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt or Michael Douglas look-alike, or a custom de-
sign created specially for you. (S)he can be as tall or as short as you wish,
as fat or as thin, as dark or as fair.
Choosing the characteristics you desire will be a simple process. You
will be offered all these choices on a monitor in the robot shop and you
will select exactly those appearance and physical characteristics, its voice,
its cultural interests and other hobbies, its personality traits and any other
features that you want. You will be able to ask for it to be submissive or
domineering, exactly as intelligent as you are, or more so, or less. You can
have these and all of its emotional and other personality characteristics
change at whatever intervals you wish, so you could specify a robot that
is domineering in the mornings (when you need to be encouraged to
go to work on time) but submissive at night. The choice will be yours.
And of course, if you are not 100 percent happy with the robot when
you collect it from the robot factory, it comes with a lifetime guarantee
(your lifetime, that is)—you can change any or all of its features, traits
and characteristics as and when you wish, simply by telling it how you
want it to change. The net result will be robots that provide all the
characteristics we want in a companion/spouse/lover.
Arthur Harkins, an anthropologist at the University of Minnesota,
has predicted that
Even if we made them as appliances, not as fully intelligent devices,
they could still have a lot of these features, including bubbling con-
versations. I'm talking about something here that could threaten
the whole idea of—that could render unnecessary—human [to hu-
man] marriages. [10]
Harkins caused astonishment in the mid-1970s when he predicted that,
before the year 2000, the first test case of a human-robot marriage would
be in the courts. (This was a remark made to a journalist in a casual
conversation after the formal conclusion of a conference on the future
of the family.) Harkins confessed to me in 2003 that he had not in fact
married a robot “...or even a biodroid, but am happily married to a
Ukrainian sociologist. Yes, she is very, very human!” [11]
Harkins' marrying-a-robot prediction had the support of some of
his colleagues in the academic community, one of whom, Nelson Otto,
