Robot LOVE

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cnd-0719-intel-chip. Intel's Core 2 computer processor chips, in business and consumer PCs later this summer, are smaller but more efficient and will outperform previous Intel and competitors' chips. The main processing die core (centre, below peeled top) has 291 million transistors, which include four megabytes of shared cache memory. With story by Steve Makris for CanWest Computer and Workplace Package. (Photo handout) (CNS)

It's hard to think of a more attention-grabbing title than Robots, Men, and Sex Tourism -- especially in the academic world.

Written by researchers from New Zealand's University of Wellington and published recently in the journal Futures, the paper predicts in the decades to come, humans will patronize robot-staffed brothels, freeing them from the guilt associated with visiting a flesh-and-blood prostitute. Perhaps predictably, it sparked a lively conversation about whether the sex industry could be automated -- and not a little squeamishness about the whole idea of robot-human relations.

That at least some of us will be having sexual intercourse with robots in the future should be obvious by now. Somebody out there will make love to just about any consumer good that enters the home.

But will our robot-human relations be relegated to the bedroom, or will love enter the equation, too? Is our society headed in a direction that will support this transition? Looking at current trends, I'd say the answer is a resounding yes.

For most, contemplating the prospect of robot sex is immediately distasteful. The mind conjures up alchemists' combinations of rubber and silicone and hair follicles. It is hard to dismiss that slack-jawed, shark-eyed stare of love dolls, their pale arms covered by gummy, petroleum-product skin.

But those aren't the siren love robots of the future. Realistic skin, the ability to make eye contact, faux breathing (to avoid that "walking human corpse" feel), convincing conversational skills, dexterous manipulation of objects and the ability to not walk through sliding glass doors -- we can assume these things will be attainable within the next few decades.

Consider the PR2 "personal" robot from Willow Garage. With an open-source brain located in a Google cloud, this machine can already navigate a home environment to fetch beers, load a dishwasher, and precisely fold laundry.

In 2007's Love and Sex With Robots, Dr. David Levy claimed we humans -- that's men and women, so you're not off the hook, ladies -- will become smitten with new breeds of advanced humanoid robots due to arrive within the next half-century.

Many of our social interactions have been reduced to the bare-bones transfer of information via various online media: text messages, emails, shared videos and pictures, status updates, and, uh, pokes. We routinely create online profiles that distill our lives to a list of data points -- much in the way a role-playing game stat sheet boils down your complex and multi-faceted elvish archer to only his intelligence, dexterity and charisma. For people who have been raised on text-based interactions, just speaking on the telephone can be high bandwidth to the point of anxiety.

The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human beings in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute of face-to-face time lost. For better or worse, new modes of interaction are steadily eroding the more "traditional" forms of interaction familiar to older generations. New streamlined interactions between human beings may open the door for machines to join us as social peers and not just sex objects.

Looking ahead, future generations may learn their social skills from robots in the first place. The cute yellow Keepon robot from Carnegie Mellon University has shown the ability to facilitate social interactions with autistic children. Morphy, a robot at the University of Washington, happily teaches gestures to children by demonstration. With infinite patience and zero judgment, new classes of social robots are in development to offer the ultimate low-risk social tutor to human beings. If you're raised (at least in part) by a machine, falling in love with one might not seem so bizarre.

In the end, perhaps it will be the true romantics, not the nerds, who choose to flee from a world of impersonal, digitized relationships and into the arms of simulacrums with manners imported from simpler times.

This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy and culture.

-- Slate

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 13, 2012 A2