There was a time when humanity faced the universe alone and without a friend. Now he has creatures to help him…Mankind is no longer alone.

 

Isaac Asimov (I, Robot).

The Instutute of Robotic Psychology and Robotherapy sees a great future for  person -robot relationships. Robotic psychology looks at the compatibility between people and artificial creatures on different levels such as sensorimotor, emotional, cognitive and social , in other words how they interact with each other, while Robotherapy basically looks at how robots can be used to interact and communicate with people for a wide range of therapeutic reasons , for example offering diagnostic ability , treatment , care, support or just plain  companionship.

The 'why' of Robotic psychology is pretty obvious as there have been massive advances in Robotics in the last couple of decades and a shift away from creating  robots for industrial application towards designing personal robots for use in the home. There are currently 2 million Roomba robots cleaning peoples homes and other affordable robots are being designed , programmed and built to take care of a variety of other household and personal chores all the time and South Korea has set a goal that 100% of households should have domestic robots by 2020.

The 'when'  of Robotherapy is also a known, there are already robot systems interacting with humans in the medical and care fields  and with people with disabilities and Japan hopes to roll out robots to help take care of its growing elderly  population by 2010.

In short, we're  over viewing robots as the stuff of science fiction or even workplace machines and seem content enough to allow them into our homes and further into our lives.

The real future of Robotics though depends upon advances in Artificial intelligence (AI) There are already robots which appear to have human decision making abilities and qualities , people grow fond of and relate to theIR robots as every Furby owner knows but there's a way to go yet before robots will roll of the production line with on board morality, emotions,  free will, and empathy right out of the box.

That said, there are many people who appear to lack these traits so its possible that robots may well end up being more human than we are.

Some people are worried about the way we are tampering with intelligence and fear that if we create super intelligent machines to help manage our lives  it'll only be a matter of time before they realise how dumb we are and take us out of the equation or get us working for them. At the other extreme , some people are more interested in how we might quite literally fall in love with Robots, view them as our partners and have sexual relations with them.

David Levy's 'Love and Sex with Robots 'looks at this interesting developing  area of person-robot interaction and explores how entities that have popularly been deemed as cold and mechanical could soon be viewed as objects of real companionship and desire. According to , Henrik Christensen, founder of the European Robotics Research Network the development of robotic sex toys may well prove the most controversial aspect of Robotics but he predicts that people are going to be having sex with robots in the next five years.' They may be pretty basic ' he says  ' but people are having sex with inflatable dolls , so initially anything that moves will be an improvement'.

It is not unreasonable to suppose that a lot of the R&D into making robots more lifelike may well come from the sex industry, after all porn has been the driving force of web technologies and played a large part, whether people want to acknowledge it or not, in take up of the internet.

So the future of Robotics could be the perfect partner and companion -  considerate , intelligent , sexy and sexually compatible ... or sessions with a robot psychotherapist if it doesnt work out.

This all goes to remind me that the greatest flaw in human design is the absence of a reset button.  

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