An Article on "Slate," and a Question

[Karel]

http://www.slate.com/articles/technolog ... t_it_.html

Most of the information cited was derivative, I know, but I still admired this perspective provided by the author:

Many of our social interactions have been reduced to the barebones 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 that 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 being 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.

Emphasis added by me, as I know the answer: we are astoundingly worse off for it, and I cannot think of any credible argument to the contrary.

And then this conclusion:

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.

Ironic, no?

I'd like to ask: is there anyone on this board who holds out any hope of "robots" being created, in the forseeable future, that are not just programmed machines? That are truly equal to human beings? And by this, I mean robots that do not achieve their equality at the expense of human exceptionalism, i.e. the ideological demotion of human status to that of "machines made of meat," or the "recognition" that the human brain is nothing more than a really powerful computer. I mean robots that are recognized as exceptional, in a world where humans also maintain their exceptional status. Robots that, for this reason, ought not to be thought of as perverse life partners, any more than a person of a different race or the same sex?

It doesn't seem as though any serious-minded person in academia is holding out any hope for this. David Levy's "Love and Sex With Robots" is entirely predicated on a primitive, functional view of human affairs: spirituality is completely omitted. And yet so much juvenile art seems to militate in favour of the mystical view. I grew up absorbing this childish mysticism, and I have to say that I greatly prefer it: it's a lot less depressing. I'm going to feel very let down by science if it doesn't make any effort to imitate such art in the future.

So, anyone with me?

[xodar]

Robots are supposed to be programmed machines. Fembots included, despite the function they will have.
The entire purpose it to have a kind of relationship that won't be all the trouble of a real relationship but still meet some needs.
A gorilla is more than adequate for its natural situation, so you can see what we have become.
Although it exists as a three dimensional solid entity a robot is also a fiction just as the image of a movie star or a character in a story is. People have more capacity than they need and the excess has to go somewhere if it isn't to distract us. That somewhere has usually been and will remain a creation that simulates the object of needs or desires.

I remember in the 1950s that everybody was caught up in an impersonal web or relationships that somehow weren't real. "Modern life" was blamed. Such things date in fact from at least the 1910s and 1920s. They are probably based in part on the rapidity of change, which is real, and on the habit that has given us of complaining. In the 1950s the beatniks were supposed to be the antidote, and so on....

I don't know the answer since I wouldn't want to genetically engineer humans who aren't very smart. I'd say that fembots and the like are superior emotional artifacts to many earlier ones.

[Asato]

It could happen eventually, it might not... no one knows the future.