War of machines and human beings is unfolding before our very eyes. In early September, a 60-year-old Japanese man attacked an 'emotion-reading' robot in a fit of rage. The man later said that he did not like the attitude of the the human store clerk at a SoftBank Corp store, a Japanese mobile phone and telecommunications company, The Japan Times said.
The robot that the man attacked is known as Pepper. The machine was developed by Aldebaran Robotics and SoftBank. The humanoid can recognize human emotions by analyzing the tone of the voice and facial expressions of the human being. The robot costs 198,000 yen (about $1,600).
The video made by surveillance cameras shows the Japanese man kicking the robot. The report says that the attack affected the work of the humanoid machine.
This story is quite indicative. First and foremost, it shows that people perceive robots like living beings. "Once we accept a machine is alive, any relationship we form with it will be on the same level as any other living thing. Thus, robots are truly alive in our minds; which is perhaps more significant to the future of human-machine relationships than any Turing test. A robot doesn't need to convince us it is human - we're ready to believe it already," Alexander Reben, an engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology said.
Meanwhile, the UK has launched a campaign to ban the production of so-called sex robots.
One of such inventions is a creation of a mechanic from Nuremberg, Germany. His robot has a beating heart, and can even moan and pant. The remote-controlled robot can move its hips and breathe either through the nose or the mouth. During an act of love, the body of the machine becomes warmer. The engineer said that his goal was to build an electronic woman that would be no different in sex than a real woman.
Experts at Transhumanity futurological center believe that sex robots (sex-bots) will have plenty of advantages in comparison with living partners. First off, sex with machines will be absolutely safe. Sex bots will be made of a self-cleansing material, on which no traces of human secretions and harmful bacteria will be left.
Secondly, sex bot owners will be able to make all their sexual fantasies come true. Thirdly, a sex bot will be of great assistance to aging individuals, for whom looking for a partner is very difficult.
Thus, prostitution, sexual slavery and many other evils of our society will simply disappear as phenomena. Most likely, sex bots will cut the number of sex crimes, cases of pedophilia and other manifestations of sexual perversions as potential rapists and perverts will be able to satisfy themselves with cybernetic substitutes.
Kathleen Richardson of the University of Montfort in Leicester does not agree with such forecasts, though. According to the expert, sex robots threaten the future of humanity, because they will make sex a mechanical and soulless process, enhancing gender equality and declaring the role of women exclusively as sexual objects.
Daria Lyubimskaya
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