Arse Elektronika: Robot/Human Interaction

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 8 of October , 2007 at 4:10 am

Believe it or not, I didn’t sign up for Arse Elektronika just for performances like Friday night. No, I’m exploring deep epistemological (or whatever) issues relating to the interactions between robots and humans, and it just happens that in this case, those issues are being explored via the most primal of mediums: sex.

There were quite a few talks at Arse Elektronika between Saturday and Sunday (you can read all the abstracts here), but I’m going to focus on the presentation that was the reason I decided to spend my weekend there. It was entitled “Pornomechanics: Sex Robots and the Mechanisms of Love.” I’ll be using some mildly naughty words in this post, but nothing explicit, so read on.

The first half of the presentation was a screening of Peter Asaro’s 2001 documentary Love Machine, which interviewed all kinds of roboticists and philosophers to try to determine how robots might eventually enter into our social society. Two main questions emerged, which Peter Asaro himself discussed after the movie concluded. Firstly, can robots and humans connect on a complex emotional level, and secondly, what does it mean for society if they do?

Peter Asaro completed his documentary in 2001, and since then, a lot of progress has been made on the first question. The consensus of the robot development community (in the context of Arse Elektronika, anyway) seems to be that people falling in love with robots is an inevitability. And we’ve seen numerous examples of precursors to this lately, as people connect emotionally (on some level) to robots with even the smallest bit of artificial intelligence. Keepon is a good example (you love Keepon, don’t you?), but an even better one is an article I posted last week about people connecting emotionally with their Roombas. Roombas don’t even have any anthropomorphic qualities, and still people treat them like pets, perhaps even more than other robots who are anthropomorphic. I asked Peter Asaro about this, and his comment was that sometimes, it’s easier for people to become involved emotionally with robots without human features. This seems a bit paradoxical, but humans are very good at anthropomorphizing just about anything no matter what it looks like (who have you seen in your grilled cheese sandwich lately?), and lack of human features allows each person to subconsciously project a human personality onto something that’s not human, without having to get past obvious flaws or pseudo-human “creepy-ness.”

If it is an inevitability to get emotionally involved with robots, is it a bad thing? One of the roboticists in the movie commented that “people fall in love with their pets. Why should falling in love with your robot, which is perhaps as smart as your pet, be such a bad thing?” The easiest argument to make here is that robots aren’t alive, which poses all sorts of social, moral, and religious questions… But in a way, it’s a moot point. It matters less whether the robot is actually alive and more whether we treat the robot as if it is alive. Again, we do the same thing with our pets, treating them as if they understand what we say and what we want on a level that’s not physically attainable for them. However, there’s no real limit to what may be a physically attainable level of understanding for a robot. Is there any difference, for example, between a model of an emotion and a real emotion, or between genuinely falling in love and being programmed to fall in love? Roboticists don’t think so. After all, aren’t we humans just acting out a genetic program in response to external stimuli?

This is the point at which things start to get socially complicated. For example, I think most people would agree that masturbation doesn’t equate to infidelity. Okay, how about if you masturbate with a toy, is that any different? Probably not, right? Take a couple small technological steps, and you arrive at masturbation with (or, I guess, by) a robot. Is that being unfaithful? What if you get emotionally involved with the robot, which as I’ve already discussed, is already fairly commonplace? Basically, the question becomes this: what would a robot need for it to be cheating when you have a relationship with it?

Interestingly, roboticists from the porn industry, as well as respected philosophers, seem to have both somewhat independently arrived at the same conclusion. One of the roboticists in the film put is thus: “Having sex with a machine is not cheating. If the machine could have an emergent orgasm, then it would be cheating.” Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s take was that cheating would occur “when the robot transgresses its programming, when we don’t know exactly what is going inside the robot and we consequently have to treat it like it has thoughts.” So in a nutshell, robots cease to be robots (in the sexual sense, anyway) when they are able to respond to us in unpredictable (read: emotional) ways.

To finish up here (it’s about time, right?), getting emotionally involved with robots is not only inevitable, it’s already happening. It may be that each of us individually will have to decide whether we respect the existence of artificial emotions and all of the implications that come with them, be they human-human or human-robot. And this goes way beyond having robots as sexual partners… What place do robots that display emotions have in our society as a whole? It’s a lot to wrap your head around, and after attending Arse Elektronika, I personally have more questions than answers. Any way you look at it, though, the next few years are going to be pretty wild ones for the social robotics movement. And we here at BotJunkie will be with it every step of the way.

[ Arse Elektronika ]

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Category: Artificial Intelligence, Pop Culture

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