Friday, November 16, 2007

I now pronounce you man and robot

Submitted by Keith Shaw on F

Humans may marry robots in 2050. That's OK if the robots look like Seven of NineI'm a certified sci-fi geek and fan of future technology, but this next piece of news even creeps me out a bit.

According to this Computerworld story, an artificial intelligence researcher is predicting that humans will be marrying robots by the year 2050 because of dramatic advances in robotics.

David Levy, a British artificial intelligence researcher whose book, "Love and Sex with Robots," will be released next Tuesday (Nov. 6), says robots will be very much like a new race of people because of their abilities to have intelligent conversations and display emotions.

While this may sound exciting to some people, I think it would open up a whole new set of problems. I had a hard enough time as a teen-ager trying to communicate with humans of the opposite sex, imagine how weird it would be to get turned down for a date by a robot.

Then again, if all of the robots in 2050 look like 7 of 9 from Star Trek, I would work on my human-robot pickup lines in a hurry. "Hey baby, you have the most beautiful neural network I've ever seen."

Update: The slide show boys have put together a list of the 10 Robots We'd Like to Marry. Check it out.

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