You Might Be Able To Marry A Robot By 2050

Robots are the future… in more than one way.

Single people: everything is going to be OK. If you’ve given up on ever finding someone and have vowed to be alone with your cats until the end of time, you may want to reconsider.

With technology taking over pretty much everything these days, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that it may take over our love lives, too. I mean, sex robots are kind of a thing and virtual porn is heading towards a market takeover. It won’t be long before the robots who fill our sexual desires start to satisfy our emotional desires, too.

At a recent “Love And Sex With Robots” conference (it’s a real thing… seriously) at the University of London, David Levy, expert and author of a book on love between humans and robots, predicated that sex robot marriages would be legal by 2050. The director of the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore, Adrian Cheok, said that the prediction seems pretty valid.

During his speech at the conference, Cheok was quoted as saying, “That might seem outrageous because it’s only 35 years away. But 35 years ago people thought homosexual marriage was outrageous… Until the 1970s, some states didn’t allow white and black people to marry each other. Society does progress and change very rapidly.”

I’ve got to say, the man makes a pretty good point. In fact, Cheok is full of logical wisdom and just listening to his point of view makes the whole robot-human marriage sound rather lovely.

He goes on to argue that marrying robots could make huge improvements to society as many human-to-human marriages are unhappy or end up in divorce. He also argues that while society assumes that everyone has the ability to meet someone, fall in love, get married and live happily ever after, this is simply not the case for a huge part of the population.

When comparing a bad marriage to a human or a marriage to a robot, Cheok believes that the robot relationship is a much better option.

While there are still massive yet doable improvements to be made to sex robots, the biggest challenge for making them lovable is the skill of conversation. By making robots look like they love you and, more importantly, make you FEEL like they love you, you are going to feel that same kind of connection as you would get with human love.

Humans are capable of loving pets and fictional characters, which is why Cheok believes that falling in love with robots is not a big stretch. Cheok offers up some pretty convincing arguments, but there are two sides to every story and others are not so convinced that human and robot marriages will be successful.

Professor at The University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland, Oliver Bendal, argues that love and sex robots will have no moral standing. He believes that the whole contract of marriage involves duties that robots can’t actually perform, such as taking care of the children. However, he somehow still believes that this marriage option can become legal by 2050, simply because of public pressures.

With the possibility of the government taking action against this kind of marriage, the professor thinks that anything could happen and that we should prepare ourselves for any outcome.

Falling in love and marrying a robot — the pro and con lists for this topic are both long. What do you think? Would marrying a robot ever seem appealing to you?