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Humans could soon be having sexual relationships with robots, a top academic has claimed.
Dr Helen Driscoll said advances in technology mean the way in which humans interact with robots is set to change drastically in the coming years.
Dr Driscoll, a leading authority on the psychology of sex and relationships, said 'sex tech' was already advancing at a fast pace and by 2070, physical relationships will seem primitive.
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She said: "Most people successfully integrate other forms of virtual reality into their lives, but virtual sex - not to mention love - will be seen by some as infidelity, and this will present real challenges to some relationships."In the world of the future, we could well see human relationships increasingly conducted entirely online.
Would you feel cheated on if your partner had sex with a robot?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:06AM
The article, and the one you linked both have a gloomy tone, as if robot sex, virtual reality, or some other advance are changes that might put humanity in danger of going extinct. Why, everyone might prefer all kinds of other things to sexual partners, and then no more babies will be born! Probably similar things were said of the TV back in the 1950s. But this time around, they point to all these young people, especially in Japan, who aren't interested in sex, marriage, or children. And while the articles don't explicitly connect those dots for the readers, they do point them out. Young people aren't having kids, and, thanks to technology, there are all these other fun things for people to do.
I think one other big thing is going on. At this time overpopulation seems a much more imminent and serious problem than underpopulation. If anything, we should be relieved that so many young people aren't interested in having children. Why aren't they interested? Is it because they've been drugged by technology? I think a much more powerful instinct has come into play, which is that people really are much less interested in procreation if the environment doesn't look favorable. And for the immediate future, things definitely look less rosy. We're short of jobs, room, and food. We're not used to seeing this instinct in play, because with the exception of Rwanda, we haven't had an acute overpopulation problem in some time. Have to go back to, what, the Irish Potato Famine around 1850? And in any case, for that and the relatively few similar events since, other reasons have been raised. Between 1500 and about 1950, there's been the relief valve of lots of virgin frontier territory, the New World and Wild West and the like. That's all gone now. Where else is there to expand? Mars? Antarctica, Siberia and northern Canada? The Sahara and other deserts? Instead of fruitful empty lands, we're facing the prospect of Climate Change disrupting our current food supplies. We may be standing on a crumbling overhang. If we're pushing the population limits of our tech and Earth now, a reduction will be most painful. Mostly we've minimized and headed off overpopulation problems with massive technological advances. Crop yield has increased an astonishing amount thanks to Norman Borlaug. How much further we can advance is hard to guess, but it may be that technological advance is slowing. Maybe we're in the twilight of a Golden Age of expansion, and the young sense this.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday August 05 2015, @08:29AM
Unfortunately, the corollary to that postulate is that the people most likely to continue breeding are those least able to recognize the endemic problems we're facing. We can only hope that such lack of perspective isn't hereditary.
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Wednesday August 05 2015, @10:12AM
We can only hope that such lack of perspective isn't hereditary.
If it even occaisionally is hereditary, then it will be selected for until it is generally hereditary. That's how evolution works.
(For those that haven't read "The Selfish Gene", I recommend it. It's a good intro to how evolution works, as well as being full of interesting examples.
Personally, I found "The Extended Phenotype" to be even better, but it builds on the concepts in The Selfish Gene so you should read that first.)
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:08PM
At this time overpopulation seems a much more imminent and serious problem than underpopulation.
Also don't forget the PHD reproduction problem, where individual profs will sometimes get all handwringy about not having enough doctoral students working under them, without thinking thru the whole problem that in a steady state-ish field the average college prof only needs to produce ONE successful phd student in their lifetime. If they squirt out 100 the whole system collapses based on supply and demand.
Likewise around 1900 european ancestry folks all have genealogy stories about families with 12 kids and 11 survived to adulthood in complete shock because in the olden days pre-civil engineering women had to squirt out like 12 kids to have 50:50 odds that two would survive to adulthood for the next generation. Now that the odds are more like 2.1 kids per woman, its not as much of an issue.
So technically women only need to have sex 2.1 times in their life, if they time for max fertility, partner is fertile, etc. Some fraction of the population spending multiple decades of their lives not having sex is just not a serious reproductive problem.
Another way to put it is aside from very short term honeymoon type experiences most folks never spend more than an hour a day having sex yet the world is crawling with kids, so spending 19/20ths of the time or 95% of the time with robots is CLEARLY not a serious impairment.