David Levy on Colbert Report

Here’s an excerpt from an Scientific American interview with Levy:

And, as you mention in Love and Sex with Robots, brothels in Japan and South Korea already offer sex with dolls for the same rates they would charge for human prostitutes. So in studying sex with prostitutes, you figured you might begin to understand what the thinking behind sex with robots would be.
I started analyzing the psychology of clients of prostitutes. One of the most common reasons people pay for sex was that people wanted variety in sex partners. And with robots, you could have a blonde robot today or a brunette or a redhead. Or people want different sexual experiences. Or they don’t want to commit to a relationship, but just to have a sexual relationship bound in time. All those reasons that people want to have sex with prostitutes could also apply to sex with robots.

But sex with robots won’t just be a guy thing?
When I started, the research was almost entirely on male clients, but the number of women who pay for sex is on the increase, although there’s not much published on the subject. That shows both sexes are interested and willing and desirous to get sex they paid for. Heidi Fleiss is proposing to open a brothel in Nevada where all the sex workers are male and the clients are female. You already have something similar in Spain.

If people fall in love with robots, aren’t they just falling in love with an algorithm?
It’s not that people will fall in love with an algorithm, but that people will fall in love with a convincing simulation of a human being, and convincing simulations can have a remarkable effect on people.

When I was 10, I was in Madame Tussauds waxworks in London with my aunt. I wanted to find someone to get to some part of the exhibition and I saw someone, and it didn’t dawn on me for a few seconds that that person was a waxwork. It had a profound effect on me—that not everything is as it seems, and that simulations can be very convincing. And that was just a simple waxwork.

And if you or others could be taken in just by a wax figure, even for a moment, imagine what a realistic robotic simulation of a person would do. But if people are aware that a robot’s just electronics, won’t that be an obstacle to true love?
By 40 or 50 years, everyone of a marriageable age will have grown up with electronics all around them at home, and not see them as abnormal. People who grow up with all sorts of electronic gizmos will find android robots to be fairly normal as friends, partners, lovers.

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This dude is pretty creepy but I think he might be right. Dudes in Japan are already spending fortune on girlfriend dolls. It won’t be long before the dolls are talking and doing other stuff.

If you haven’t seen Lars and the Real Girl, it gets into some of these issues of intimacy and is a movie I’d highly recommend.

The Psychology of Voting

NY Times: voting has benefits beyond getting your candidate elected…

“It may be a form of identity construction for individuals,” Dr. Gailmard wrote in an e-mail message. “Or it could be a duty to do the right thing, or a social norm.”

Sounds postmodern. I buy it. Voting maintenances a narrative of individuality and informs our sense of who we are.

Casting a ballot clearly provides a value far higher than its political impact. The benefit may include side payments — say, the barbecues and camaraderie of a campaign, or the tiny possibility that a single vote may be decisive.

But recent research suggests that it has more to do with civic duty and the maintenance of moral self-image. In a series of experiments, researchers from Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley, have had study participants play a simple election game involving monetary rewards. A group of designated voters cast their vote for Choice A, an equal distribution of money among voters and nonvoters in the study; or B, a payout to be split only among the designated voters — a smaller group, so a higher amount. It cost money to vote, and participants could abstain at no cost.

The study authors, led by Sean Gailmard at Berkeley, called Choice A “ethical” and Choice B “selfish.” They found that ethical voting ran highest, at about 20 percent, when individual votes were least likely to affect the outcome. Selfish voting ran highest, also about 20 percent, when individuals’ choices were most likely to change the outcome.

This finding could explain why people might vote against a local tax increase but for a Congressional candidate who was likely to raise their income taxes: their vote carries far less value in a national race than in a local one.

This has got me thinking about voting for Obama.

If voting plays a role in identity construction, could Obama being on the ballot be helping us reconstruct our sense of who we are as individuals?

In the same way that this study showed that we are more likely to vote for people who look like us, I wonder if there is a pull effect on a symbolic level as well.

Could we be more likely to try and identify with people that we vote for – potentially moving us into new territory where we can construct our identities?

I feel like you could argue that this is an effect of Obama getting elected…he’s helping us to reconstruct our own identities as Americans, on an individual level.