by David Levy
The controversy over same-sex marriage is not the only reason why attitudes to marriage in America have undergone dramatic change. Cott mentions how women’s legal identities and their property used to be subsumed into those of their husbands, and we should not forget that in the past, wives were sometimes themselves regarded as the property of their husbands. These issues of unequal ownership have been erased with time, but the subject of ownership seems likely to reappear, though in a completely equal guise, when humans of either sex acquire and thereby own robots that act as their lovers and their spouses.
Cott also touches on another important and relevant change in the history of marriage in the United States, “the dissolution of marital prohibitions based on race.” Even though such unions were previously far from unknown, it was not until 1967 that interracial marriages were ruled to be legal in the United States, when the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the sixteen states that still at that time considered marriage across the color line to be void or criminal. The statistics for interracial marriage have since given proof to the overwhelming need for that change: The number of marriages in the United States between African-Americans and Caucasians rose from 51,000 in 1960 to more than 440,000 in 2001.
Same-sex marriage, ownership of a wife and her property, and interracial marriage are but a few of the most significant changes that are apparent from a study of the history of marriage in the United States. Other major changes include an acceptance of the fact that marriage is not necessarily for life, as evidenced by the 50-percent-plus divorce rate in the United States, and the increasing proportion of couples who opt not to have children. All these and other changes of attitude to marriage lead us to the conclusion, succinctly enunciated by Nancy Cott, that “change is characteristic of marriage. It’s not a static institution…. People can cohabit without great social disapproval; they can live in multigenerational families; there are scenes of group living; there are gay unions or civil unions. There is a greater variety of household forms that are approved and accepted, or at least tolerated….”
Social change is happening faster now than it did two hundred, one hundred, or even fifty years ago, with the result that change in the meaning and purpose of marriage is also happening faster than ever before, and the rate of such change seems certain to accelerate. Chapter 8 provides a relevant example—it is an analysis of how our sexual mores and attitudes have changed over time. In the case of marriage, it seems eminently reasonable to assume that changes in the approval, acceptability, and tolerance of different ideas and new forms of marital relationship will take place over periods no longer than the few decades that were needed to make interracial marriage and same-sex marriage socially acceptable to many and legally acceptable to the state. Cott points out that in the late twentieth century, marriage moved “towards the spouses themselves defining what the appropriate marital role or preference is.” This newfound freedom for couples to define their respective roles within their marriages now extends into the realm of legal agreement. Elisabeth Bartholet, holder of the Wasserstein Public Interest Chair in Law at Harvard, observes that the legal context of marriage has shifted from one in which the state has “enormous control over marriage” to one where people write “the terms of their own marriage” and are “allowed to have premarital contracts.”11 Furthermore, Bartholet comments that the trend of recognizing de facto relationships means that “if you look like a family, feel, smell like a family—you cook meals together, share bank accounts—then you are a family for the purpose of the law.”
In summary, marriage is changing at such a rate that there appear to be ever-increasing levels of acceptance and tolerance of how any given couple wishes to conduct their lives together. And as part of the right to choose will come the right to choose one’s spouse, even a robot spouse. By the time that today’s infants are entering matrimony, many of them will be deciding for themselves almost all the rules and laws that are to govern their unions.* By the time their children are ready for marriage, around the middle of this century, I believe that such a freedom of decision will be almost universally exercised.
How, then, will today’s children and their children make use of their own generations’ newfound freedom of marital choice? In attempting to answer this question, we first consider the main criteria employed in the choice of marriage partner. Elaine Hatfield and Susan Sprecher have examined preferences in marital partners in three different cultures—the United States, Russia, and Japan—in preparation for which they selected twelve criteria after studying several other lists of reasons for mate selection from the psychology literature. A total of 1,519 college students took part in their survey (634 men and 885 women), in which they were asked to rate each of the twelve criteria on a scale from 1 (unimportant) to 5 (essential). The results given in Table 1 indicate that of the twelve criteria, only the seventh-ranked—“being ambitious”—and the three lowest-ranked characteristics could reasonably be argued to be inappropriate descriptors for the robots of the next few decades. All six of the top-ranked characteristics will be demonstrable by robots within that time frame, and as for being physically attractive and skilled as a lover, these characteristics will in my opinion be among the first to be demonstrated with some measure of success.
TRAIT
MEAN RATING (OUT OF 5)
Kind and understanding
4.38
Has sense of humor
3.91
Expressive and open
3.81
Intelligent
3.73
Good conversationalist
3.72
Outgoing and sociable
3.47
Ambitious
3.36
Physically attractive
3.27
Skill as a lover
3.17
Shows potential for success
2.95
Money, status, and position
2.50
Athletic
2.50
Ratings of the Mate Selection Traits12
TABLE 1
With the freedom for couples to define the parameters of their own marriages will also come the freedom for the individual to define what he or she intends his or her own marriage to mean. Seeking a suitable human spouse might then become not only an exercise in matching interests, personalities, and the various other factors that we know to influence the falling-in-love process but also a search for someone who has used this same freedom of choice as to the meaning, rules, and purpose of marriage to create a model that matches one’s own. This relaxation of the constraints that used to provide a stable basis for the rules and expectations of marriage might therefore make it more difficult to find a spouse, since different potential spouses will be looking to play according to different sets of rules. For this reason one of the factors that I believe will contribute to the popularity of the idea of marrying a robot is the avoidance of the difficulty of finding a human partner with matching views on marriage—your robot will be programmed with views that complement your own.
Even more relevant to the practice of marriage to robots will be the question “To what extent will the new freedoms of choice regarding marriage extend to a choice of who (or what) people will legally be allowed to marry?” The United States has already seen some major changes in this respect, as interracial marriage has shifted from illegal to legal and many people’s minds and hearts are now open to the possibility of same-sex marriage. And in 2005 the Netherlands hosted a ceremony of a civil union involving three partners—a man and his two “wives”—when Victor de Bruijn, aged forty-six, from Roosendaal, “married” both Bianca (thirty-one) and Mirjam (thirty-five) in a ceremony performed before a notary who duly registered their civil union.
What novel form of civil union will be next? In future decades the sciences of creating prosthetic limbs and artificial hearts and other organs will continue to develop with accelerating pace, perhaps even adding artificial brains to the ever-growing list of body par
ts that surgeons can replace. The Norwegian philosopher Morten Søby discusses this trend in terms of the manner and extent to which it more and more reduces the distinction between man and machine and “becomes an element in the great story of evolution and development of civilization.”13 Writing about what prosthesis offers for the future, Søby explains that:
More and more artificial parts are added to the body—the result being a more artificial body. Research is being carried out with neural interfaces to develop auditory and visual prostheses, functional neuromuscular stimulants and prosthesis control through implanted neural systems, etc. Biosociological research into complex self-generating and self-referral systems is another example. Information technology and virtualization not only occupy man, nature and culture but are also about to outdate the genre of science fiction.
And to emphasize the point, Søby quotes other prominent philosophers: Paul Virilio in The Art of the Motor, who argues that “the basic distinction between Man and machine no longer applies. Both biological research and computer technology question the absolute difference between living machine and dead matter”;14 and Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” in which she asserts that “late-twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally-designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.”15
Thus with artificial limbs, organs and just about everything else body-related blurring the boundaries between real life and virtual life, it is appropriate to ask what impediments need to be lifted to make marriage between human and robot legally and socially acceptable. Right now there is no legal impediment to keep someone with an artificial leg from marrying, nor against someone with two artificial legs, or all four artificial limbs, or an artificial heart…. Where and why should society draw the line? Can we reasonably argue that it should be legally acceptable to marry someone 20 percent of whose body is made up of artificial limbs and organs, but that if the proportion were to rise to 21 percent, then such a union should be illegal? What logic dictates that a partner who is half natural and half artificial should be an acceptable marriage candidate but that a three-quarters, or 90-percent, or 100-percent artificial partner should not? Here lies a difficulty for the lawmakers of the future, those who are given the responsibility of drafting changes designed to bring the law up to date. As robots become increasingly sophisticated, as people have them in their homes as companions, when people have sex with them and fall in love with them, so it will become appropriate for those lawmakers to paraphrase Elisabeth Bartholet’s argument thus: “If your robot looks like a partner, feels, smells like a partner—you cook meals together, share bank accounts—then you are partners for the purposes of the law.” And as to the question of a robot’s being legally able to consent to its marriage, if it says that it consents and behaves in every way consistent with being a consenting adult, then it does consent.
Finally, there are those who would ask, “Why marry?” when discussing human-robot relationships, by which they would mean, “Why would anyone want to marry any robot?”—as opposed to why marry a particular robot. Two of the most commonly given reasons as to why people marry are love and companionship. Part one of this book has, I hope, convinced the reader that loving a robot will come to be viewed as a perfectly normal emotional experience and that before very long, robots will be regarded by many as interesting, entertaining, and stimulating companions. If these two reasons for getting married, love and companionship, are the foundation for so many millions of marriages between human couples, why should the same reasons not provide a valid basis for the decision to marry a robot?
Some Aspects of the Physical Design of Robots
The eventual acceptance of robots as sentient beings, worthy of our friendship, our love, and our respect will be greatly facilitated by the physical design and construction of robots whose appearance matches our notions of friendliness. Masahiro Mori, head of the robotics department at Tokyo University, was one of the first roboticists to suggest that a robot with a humanlike appearance will be apt to engender feelings of familiarity and affection from humans. This view is borne out by a study based on one of the first controlled experiments to examine the effect of a humanoid robot’s appearance on people’s responses, with a machinelike robot used as a comparison. The study suggests that people may be more willing to share responsibility with a humanoid as compared with robots that are less humanlike and more machinelike. And if the physical design of a robot creates an appearance in the human image, the robot’s physical actions and movements will provide immediate and easily comprehensible social cues, thereby enhancing a human’s perception of any interaction with the robot and making it easier for the human to engage with it socially. If, for example, the human swears at the robot, it could stick out its tongue as a gesture of complaint. But if the robot did not have a tongue to stick out, it would not be able to convey its feelings in this humanlike way, while if the robot’s tongue were not designed into its mouth but instead were located on the lower part of one of its legs, perhaps the action of sticking out its tongue might not have the same effect on the human.
Even though a robot’s appearance brings nothing to bear on its intellectual capabilities, it has been shown by psychologists that in general we prefer to interact with robots with whom we find it easy to identify, as compared to robots whose appearance is strikingly nonhuman.* But there is still a way to go before humanoids are as physically appealing as Stepford wives and their malebot counterparts. Although they are technically remarkable for their time and great fun to watch, the robots of today are not exactly Mr. Handsome or Ms. Beautiful, nor are they as cuddly as pet cats, dogs, rabbits, or Furbies. The Carnegie Mellon University robot, Grace, who attended an academic conference in Canada in 2002, managed to find its way around the conference building well enough to register for the conference, reach a lecture room by itself (asking for directions only when necessary), and deliver a talk on how it worked. But Grace did not look at all humanlike or even animal-like. Its “face” was an image displayed on a computer screen that formed the top part of its construction, while the remainder of its body was a mass of metal parts, electronics, wheels, and much of the other paraphernalia one would expect to find in an engineering laboratory. So although Grace performed admirably and with a certain measure of physical dexterity (she could navigate her way into an elevator and exit at the correct floor), she was not exactly anyone’s idea of a great-looking date.
One might argue that only the capabilities of a robot should matter to us and not its looks, but I believe that looks will matter a lot, a belief that stems partly from an experience I had around the age of ten. The first time I visited Madame Tussauds museum in London, I asked a gentleman dressed in a uniform the way to some particular part of the exhibition, only to realize after a second or two that he was not on the museum staff—he was one of the waxworks. So convincing was the wax janitor’s appearance that I’d been fooled into thinking “he” would respond to my question and would know the answer. After all, he looked just as I expected a museum janitor to look. This experience has doubtless been shared by many thousands of the museum’s other visitors, and it is a valuable lesson in understanding an important aspect of human-robot relationships. The appearance of a robot will affect how people perceive it, particularly their first impressions, as well as how they interact with it and the development of their relationships with it. If a robot has all the appearances of being human, then we will increasingly adopt an anthropomorphic attitude toward it and find it much easier to accept the robot as being sentient, of being worthy of our affections, leading us to accept it as having character and being alive. Thus the appearance of a robot’s head and face are clearly extremely important factors in our initial reactions when meeting it. First impressions do count. This is why it is not sufficient for the Graces of the future to look like electronics laboratories on whee
ls, or even on awkwardly moving legs. They must walk in a humanlike fashion, and above all they must be appealing in their appearance. Only then will huge numbers of people want them as their friends and lovers.
One year after Grace made her debut as a conference attendee, David Hanson, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Dallas, demonstrated a lifelike talking head. Its face had soft, flesh-colored, artificial skin made of an elastic, flexible polymer developed by Hanson especially for this purpose. The face on Hanson’s artificial head had finely sculpted cheekbones and big blue eyes. When connected to a computer the head could smile, it could frown, it could sneer, and its brow could develop furrows to give a worried look. Equally, the robot could turn its head, and particularly its eyes, toward a human, taking in through its vision system whatever emotional cues the human might be exhibiting and using this information to help it react with appropriate facial expressions. This kind of expressive power will enable robots to interact more easily with humans, using their electronic minds to control their facial expressions and head movements in accordance with whatever emotions the robot wishes to display. It is part of the human mechanism for developing two-way emotional relationships, a mechanism that will be enhanced with the affective technologies described earlier in this chapter.*
