Antonakis wrote:
Having sex with a robot sounds like a perfectly normal thing. After all today's sex dolls, electric vibrators and such are not so far away from that notion and since one of the most basic roles of technology is to please and entertain us I would more than agree with this.
But the idea of marriage with a machine, even with one possesing some artificial intelligence and consciousness (the levels of which remain to be seen), sounds very weird. I can not imagine a machine having equal rights or responsibilities with a human, even inside the micro-society of a modern family. For thousands of years, It has been engraved into the human mind that artificially produced items are possesions and that they can be destroyed and recreated at will. It was not long ago that even wives and kids were considered as personal possesions and used by their owners, actually there are places in the world where that still happens.
So if we're talking about such a kind of marriage, a marriage between a human and a machine where the human is in total control about everything and in fact owns the machine, then this is a marriage different that the norm of the civilized world and should probably not be called a "marriage". People don't marry their cars or their laptops or their sheep (they can still have sex with the last).
If on the other hand, we're talking about a marriage of equal rights, a true symbiosis (thought the part -bio- is quite wrong in there) if you will, then we have to readjust our perceptions, minds and laws in order to understand and accept the meaning of (artificial) life in a completely different way.
The term "artificial" intelligence is very superfluous. I'm actually writing a feature article on ethics and AI (I write for my university paper). I'll post it when it's online.
