Aug 25, 2017 06:26 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 25, 2017 06:32 PM by C C.)
(Aug 25, 2017 02:41 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: Wow, the colorful little unicorn always wants answers but avoids any direct examination.
What do you think, C C?
We’re talking about 100% pure sexual objectification—taking an inanimate object and giving it human social and sexual characteristics. We’re creating mechanical humans as a means to another’s end. We'll be providing people with realistic fantasies, a new reality, in which they have total control. This will become part of their daily existence. If their emotional and social development occurs within these self-centered fantasies, could it potentially retard their empathy towards others? Could it lead to a dissociative state?
It's certainly a possibility that it could lead to a dystopian future sporting a maladjusted population with a variety of psychological issues and reality impairments. But our extrapolations about the future can sometimes encounter twists and turns we never expected.
One positive result might be a vast drop in the reproduction rate, good for planet Earth. Due to living with the "perfect partners", these robot-lovers might turn out to be super-timid and less prone to physical or vocal abuse, if they rarely get much practice with drama in their pre-planned storybook or daycare lives.
Of course, those with a genetic disposition toward mental illness or psychopathic characteristics, or who tend toward unstable prolonged adolescence and sadistic / masochistic impulses -- or a healthy percentage who just do their part to maintain the status quo of drug / alcohol addiction... Those may still engender plenty of domestic chaos and oscillating rage. With the torn skin, hair, and dangling parts of their androids exhibiting some of the handiwork when venturing outdoors.
Isaac Asimov's novel "The Naked Sun" featured a society that was at least withdrawn in certain respects. But the story didn't deal with robots that were wholly good substitutes for real people, and the inhabitant's tele-holographic presence with each other still maintained a basic cultural discipline (albeit passionless).
The book focuses on the unusual traditions and culture of Solarian society. The planet has a rigidly controlled population of 20,000, and robots outnumber humans ten thousand to one. People are taught from birth to avoid personal contact, and live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Face-to-face interaction, and especially impregnating a woman, when replacement of a decedent is necessary, was seen as unavoidable but dirty. In contrast, when "viewing" each other (as opposed to in-person "seeing"), they are free of modesty, and have no problem if an interlocutor sees the other's naked body. For communication they use holography, then the subject of experiments by physicists [back in the 1950s when it was written]. A two-way teleconference allowed the participants to hear and see each other, but in 3D, almost unheard of among the public at the time, for whom color television was a novelty. [Elijah] Baley insists on face to face conversations, traveling in a closed vehicle because of his own agoraphobia, from his life in the enclosed cities of Earth.
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