This should be a future worth to be seen?

[Skybird]

a machine remains to be a machine. And if man must use this machinistic crutch to find partner, relation, pleasure, than something is wrong - and no software ever can breathe a soul into an assembled kit of technical gimmicks. I mean these things are even no replicants - they are machines!

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,druck-522919,00.html

there is a radical alternative in explaining this, though. that is that human emotions are far more suggestible than we are ready to admit, and can indeed be triggered easily by just providing the matching key stimuli. example: parts of thie audience in a cinema crying - for what?

A partnership with a robot - i think that becomes difficult at the latest when man starts to become old, and approaches his death soon. then the sould may no longer be willing to be foold by a software only, but reaches out to touch another living soul in fact, not a simulacrum. and when you live in loneliness, or under socially difficult circumstances - how does it feel to know that you only found company by having it getting tailored to your needs artificially, and because you payed for it? the gift of love is that it is given for free, and does not demand in return. paying for an illusion is what separates a prostitute from a true lover.

Buying a robot? Not really the way to boost your self-esteem, i assume.Our understanding, our way of seeing ourselves, the state of our culture has chnaged since the 40s and 50s, and most drastically. maybe it is not wise to see certain things still in the naive rosy light of the early days of Asimov's robot tales.

Or think of it like this:

"My dildo has an IQ of 145."
"Nice and well, but mine is better. My dildo actually can talk!"
:D

[Letum]

Well, you might be right, but each to his own.

I wonder what will happen when the day comes that we create a machine whose
"mind" is indistinguishable from a humans.

[HunterICX]

:-?
disturbing...

Thought, what will hapen if you make love with your real wife, and that sexbot sees it? will she turn into a killing machine out of jealousy? :lol:

[Yahoshua]

It seems Jean Paul Sartres musings of Man and Machines' interchangeability is becoming more and more real.

Skybird has, I believe, struck the issue right on the head. A robotic object, even like our own PCs', will never fully substitute for actual humans. Even heavy PC users still interact with other humans in real life or via computer.

I believe this method of integrating gynoids as a sex toy is a complete waste when we could be using them as desperately needed medical staff (just download the whole medical course into tehir system!) that will make fewer mistakes, will never complain about needing vacations and will be cheaper to maintain over time than the current means of driving intern staff to absolute exhaustion at work.

[Letum]

Just to play devil's advocate:

What do you suppose we are, other than machines ruled by causality acting upon our
mechagnisms?

Is a machine as equaly complex, able and intelligent than us, any less one of us?

If you think there would be a non-physical self or a "soul" missing, then how do you
know it is missing?
For all we can know, even our PC's have a non-physical self or "soul". If you can
justify disregarding that notion for a machine with a exact likeness of yourself, then
what is to stop you disregarding that notion for a person with a poor likeness of
yourself?

If you think there is no non-physical self or "soul", then what is there to justify treating
such a complex, able and intelligent machine diffrently from all the complex, able and
intelligent people in the world?

[Skybird]

So far there has not been a machine being concerned abiout itself, it's own future, it's own status after being deconstructued again. Or to use that favourite story of mine, so far there has not been any "robot dreaming of electric sheep", being aware of his own existence, wondering where he was coming from.

Astronomers have since long claimed that if there is inztelligent life out there, it probbaly consists of machines holding an intelligence and self-awareness that probably has been put into them, at least in form of a self-developing seed, by their orignal creators. The reason simply is that organic life forms and organic bodies simply are so vulnerable and hard to maintain, that most civilisations surviving the kindergarten of their technological youth sooner or later will choose to survive and gain longer lifespans - far longer ones! - by transforming their mind and intelligence into mechanical bodies. By the fact that 90% of oiur galaxy's space is muczh older than the 10% where earth is located in, any surviving civilisation in this galaxy has a 90% chance to doznes of millions of years older than we are. such lifespans maybe cannot be reached from civilisations that depend on life and mind being encapsuled in organic matter. Of course, this theory depends on a view that says that life can onoly be defined by temrns of life on earth, basing on organic molecules. we do not know if earth is really that representative as we think. mybe it is a continuation of the old belief that all universe is revolving around the earth, by other means.

However, even that theory considers such intelligent living machines as being alive by holding the lives of their former creators, not by being alive by and thorugh themselves alone. they are carrying the life of their creator. They are not a species defined by itself.

Life on earth sees developement over millions of years. It is no linear developement, as often is suggested, you only need to look close enough. Many different developement phases do not exist in sequence, one taking over from the other, but they exist parallel. For us humans, adaptation to changing environmental challenges is no longer an option, due to the speed these chnages take place, wehn we for example make a diving holiday, or fly in the air. Probably even man-made climate change happens to fast as if we could biologically adapt. For us, tehcnolgy has become a tool of adaptation, and it is now part of our identity to master the future chnages in our evolutional fate. Wehre as the ape who went back into the ocean, lost his hair, developed fins and fat skin etc and by that became a dolphin, perfactly adapted to the ocean as a living environment, we achieve the same by using technology.

I could imagine that eventually one day in the future, we become minds living in mechanical corpusses, or existing in a non-material energetic state (the original status of any life and mind form anyway, maybe, just consider that all matter is just almost completely empty space that is "vibrating" -"all world is sound", as a famous german physics book was entitled), but I have problems with imagining that a mechanism will ever develope a life and mind all by itself, through the interaction of all it's mechnaical components.

as far as the question was asked if we are anything more than molecular machineries, I again point at neurophysiological reasearch an brain research since the late 70s and early 80s. We know today that the comparisons tjhat were modern back then, that the brain works like a CPU with RAM and HD attached, simply is wrong, and does not even loosely compare to how the rbain really functions, and that is far more systemic or "holistic" than any computer does. these comparisons do not so much descriobe a reality about the brain, but man's fascination with his latest brain-child, computers, and his attempt to present it as shiny as possible by saying that the human brain also is not much more than this new toy of modern electronicl design.