....inventors of evil things...Romans 1:30
"A Japanese company, Gatebox, evidently felt that Alexa from Amazon isn’t disturbing enough as something to have around your house. They’ve gone several steps further with a diminutive virtual “wife” in a glass tube, a holographic cartoon character, Azuma Hikari. Motherboard summarizes:
"A Japanese company, Gatebox, evidently felt that Alexa from Amazon isn’t disturbing enough as something to have around your house. They’ve gone several steps further with a diminutive virtual “wife” in a glass tube, a holographic cartoon character, Azuma Hikari. Motherboard summarizes:
Hikari was created to be a “comforting character that is great for those living alone.” The purpose of this cutesy anime character, blue hair, mini skirt, knee high socks and all, is to “do all she can just
for the owner” — also referred to as “master.”
It seems designed specifically to appeal to lonely bachelors.
Danaher:
This is the kind of “sophisticated” reasoning that only a professor could truly love." EN&V
It seems designed specifically to appeal to lonely bachelors.
In this ad, Azuma wakes her master up in the morning, notifies him of the weather (“Take your umbrella”), and even coddles him with emotional support. During the day, while he’s at work she texts him things like “Come home early”
or “I can’t wait to see you.” When he finally gets home at the end of the day,
she’s already made sure all the lights are on and jumps up and down
inside her little glass frame, exclaiming “Missed you, darling.”
In growing and developing your healthy love for a robot, that would seem to be a major stumbling block. Danaher, interestingly, handles this with a pass to evolution. He offers two reasons why we might doubt there can be a “meaningful relationship” with an AI robot.
(I) Because the robot has a different developmental origin to a human lover and/or
(ii) because it is ultimately programmed (and controlled) by others,
who might have ulterior motives,
there is no reason to think that you are in a meaningful relationship with it.
Danaher:
But (i) is difficult to justify in this context. Unless you think that biological tissue is
magic, or you are a firm believer in mind-body dualism, there is little reason to doubt that a robot that is behaviourally and functionally equivalent to a human cannot sustain a meaningful relationship. There is, after all, every reason to suspect that we are programmed, by evolution and culture, to develop loving attachments to one another. It might be difficult to reverse-engineer our programming, but this is increasingly true of robots too, particularly when they are programmed with learning rules that help them to develop their own responses to the world.
This is the kind of “sophisticated” reasoning that only a professor could truly love." EN&V
