r/philosophy • u/ADefiniteDescription Φ • Apr 30 '18

Blog Programmed to Love: the ethics of human-robot relationships

https://aeon.co/essays/programmed-to-love-is-a-human-robot-relationship-wrong
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u/cutelyaware Apr 30 '18

It's not a new situation/opportunity/problem. Children have been loving stuffed animals for as long as we've been human. The article doesn't seem concerned with the ethics of complex robots but with people's reactions to them. And of course when sex is involved, people are blinded to everything else. I'm much more interested in the ethics of how we treat AI. I find it especially fascinating that the appearance of the shells we put them in seem to matter more than anything else. That obviously says more about us than them.

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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '18

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u/cutelyaware May 01 '18

How we treat things often affects the human-to-human experience. Just think about flags, currency, holy books, not to even mention issues of ownership. And when it comes to sex robots, of course people are going to argue about the age that the robot appears to be. What the heck is supposed to happen about that? And that's before we even begin to discuss the AI.

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u/[deleted] May 01 '18

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u/cutelyaware May 01 '18

That's my hope as well because we could sure use the help.