{"title":"Uncanny Beauty: Aesthetics of Companionship, Love, and Sex Robots","authors":"Paolo Euron","doi":"10.1162/artl_a_00361","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In the last few years there has been a lively debate on humanoid robots interacting with humans in fields where human appearance and likeness may be essential. The debate has been bolstered by advancing AI technologies as well as increasing economic interest and public attention. The feasibility, inevitability, or ethical opportunity of companionship, love, and sex robots has been discussed. I propose a philosophical and cultural approach, applying the strategies of aesthetics and literary theory to the field of artificial beings, in order to understand reasons, use, limits, and possibilities expressed by the technology applied to companionship, love, and sex robots in the contemporary cultural and social context. In dealing with aesthetics, I will state how cognitive, biological, and ethical aspects are involved, how beauty is relatable to a robot’s physical appearance, and how the aesthetics of artificial beings may offer new existential experiences.","PeriodicalId":55574,"journal":{"name":"Artificial Life","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6000,"publicationDate":"2022-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Artificial Life","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9930980/","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
In the last few years there has been a lively debate on humanoid robots interacting with humans in fields where human appearance and likeness may be essential. The debate has been bolstered by advancing AI technologies as well as increasing economic interest and public attention. The feasibility, inevitability, or ethical opportunity of companionship, love, and sex robots has been discussed. I propose a philosophical and cultural approach, applying the strategies of aesthetics and literary theory to the field of artificial beings, in order to understand reasons, use, limits, and possibilities expressed by the technology applied to companionship, love, and sex robots in the contemporary cultural and social context. In dealing with aesthetics, I will state how cognitive, biological, and ethical aspects are involved, how beauty is relatable to a robot’s physical appearance, and how the aesthetics of artificial beings may offer new existential experiences.
期刊介绍:
Artificial Life, launched in the fall of 1993, has become the unifying forum for the exchange of scientific information on the study of artificial systems that exhibit the behavioral characteristics of natural living systems, through the synthesis or simulation using computational (software), robotic (hardware), and/or physicochemical (wetware) means. Each issue features cutting-edge research on artificial life that advances the state-of-the-art of our knowledge about various aspects of living systems such as:
Artificial chemistry and the origins of life
Self-assembly, growth, and development
Self-replication and self-repair
Systems and synthetic biology
Perception, cognition, and behavior
Embodiment and enactivism
Collective behaviors of swarms
Evolutionary and ecological dynamics
Open-endedness and creativity
Social organization and cultural evolution
Societal and technological implications
Philosophy and aesthetics
Applications to biology, medicine, business, education, or entertainment.