Love, Sex and Robots

I really enjoyed the viewing of “Love Machine” the other day.  I found the interviews with the women from the Defense for Children and all of the Sex shop people to be the most interesting.  It was nice to get the views of the people that have more a “man on the street” perspective of robots and the potential for love between robots and humans.  The women from the Defense for Children league just seemed to have a very bad perception of robot human interactions that really went beyond any real tangible reasons other than “it is wrong.”  It was also interesting that sex toy and sex shop owners really believed that we are trending towards sex objects that are as real as possible.  They really believe that there would be a market for realistic robots that can have sex with people.

I also wanted to address the criticism that the movie was more about sex or masturbation than it was about love.  I feel like this issue was addressed well enough by the movie.  Clearly, it seems that any chance for a robot that could feel love or at least be loved by humans would be a robot that is fully capable of all human interactions.  It may begin with a robot that can have sex that simulates sex with another human, but from there, someone may decide to give this robot autonomy and a personality if possible.  So, if one could not tell the difference from a robot or a human one day and then later found out after a long relationship that their partner was a robot, would they immediately give up all feelings for that robot that they believed to be human?  I personally think this would not happen.

This leads me to the question of whether robots will ever genuinely ever be able to be in love.  If autonomous robots are ever developed with a sense of morality, emotion and personality, then I do believe it possible that at the very least a robot could feel as though it is “in love.”  If this type of robot is able to be developed, than I do believe that this type of robot love would be no different than human love.  It could potentialy be a bad thing for robots to have such autonomy and emotions.  In some ways it is our emotions that lead us to irrational or harsh thinking.  Robots would likely be stronger and better than us in many ways, so adding emotions and feelings like love into the mix could make robots only grow to dislike humans.  So much autonomy could turn on us in a bad way.