When cheating with a robot is really cheating?
This question is not new, at all! For several decades sci-fi writers, philosopher, AI and robotics researcher and many others have asked this question. Obviously, not in this form.
The politically correct forms for this question are: “When a robot is self-aware?”, “Can a machine have a soul?” or “Can a machine have emotions?”. However, I think the version in this article title will be the first one to be relevant for the general population. All these questions share the same goal: they try to identify what may make a machine a “human”. There are qualities such self-awareness, the ability to feel emotions, the “soul”, that we consider our exclusive. But as the research does its job and machines become more “intelligent”, we see this belief challenged and it is natural to ask ourselves after which point we have to consider a machine alive.
The topic has been widely explored in sci-fi literature. Everybody knows Philip Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” or Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man”. In the first book the only difference between humans and androids is the lack of empathy of the latter. In the Asimov’s novelette instead Andrew Martin will be declared a man only after he altering his positronic brain so that it will decay with time, giving up his immortality. But we are going deep in the philosophy ocean! Our question is way simpler.
I propose you a simple mind game. Imagine you catch your boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/husband having sex with a machine. How would you feel? How would you react? When would you feel bad? I’m not talking about a weirdness and “eew” sensation that you may have if you find your partner having lonely sex, I’m talking about the real hurt of cheating.
Obviously, I think no one can feel sexually threatened by a mechanical sex toy like a vibrator (unless you have a really low self-esteem). Now try to add something to the machine. Things can get weirder with a human-shaped robot but I think it would be considered still be considered as an extravagant and expensive form of masturbation.
Keep adding things. We are now talking of something similar to Roxxy, an interactive talking robot, every one shipped with their own personality. It is still clearly a machine, but for how long? Soon we will have more advanced sex-robots and sooner or later we will face this problem.
I hope you understand my point. The original philosophical questions will take many years to be answered, but we will not need to wait for them. Sooner or later we will read about divorces for cheating with a robotic-sex-toy, we will read about jealousy, maybe a murder or two will be generated by this and legislative gaps will become to appear more evident.
At this point we will need no more answer because we will have already crossed the line. I know, it is way less fascinating than how sci-fi books and movies described the first contact with the “robot humanity question”; but I’m quite sure that, as usual when we talk about our human behavior, “sex will come first”.
