Robot Sex: It’s Not What You Think (Mostly SFW)

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 2 of June , 2008 at 3:58 am

This piece of robotic art by Paul Granjon features a male robot and a female robot who occasionally go into heat and attempt to mate with each other. The video does a good job explaining how it all works (and don’t worry, it’s pretty sterile), but I thought it was quite interesting how these robots have been able to so effectively reduce the human sex act to the most basic mechanical action. My feeling, though, is that emulating humans is a time consuming and inefficient way for robots to reproduce. What robot sex should be is an exchange of “genetic” information (namely data) that can be used to create a more effective robot. In some ways, every time a robot downloads a new program from a computer, you’ve got a form of reproduction happening, but on that level, it’s only creating a clone, a genetic duplicate. “Sex” implies the recombining of data from two different robots to create a new and improved robot (not necessarily in the physical sense) with the most successful characteristics preserved. ‘Course, robots getting too smart is the root of just about every evil machines enslaving humanity nightmare, but if we want our robots to learn and grow and be able to adapt to serve us better, metaphorical sex is going to have to be a big part of it.

[ ZProd ] VIA [ Communist Robot ]

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Category: Art

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