"I now pronounce you man and wife," the minister quietly intones. Applause erupts as Michael kisses Eve2114D, his robot bride. Forget about genetically engineering the perfect woman; robots that sufficiently resemble humans will appear in the next 10 years according to computer expert David Levy in his book Love and Sex with Robots (Harper Collins). When these androids get human-like skin and sufficient emotional depth, there is no doubt that humans will not only keep them in our houses, some of us will fall in love with them. Men desperate for female companionship will likely be first, particularly after some creative entrepreneur adds a robotic female sex organ.
Confusing actual humans with human-like representations is already happening. A 2007 study from University of California, San Diego found that toddlers enjoyed playing with a two-foot tall human-like robot named QRIO who responded verbally when touched. Stanford University researchers reported that people who played online poker with a computer that cared about their wins and losses said they "trusted" the computer. And in the wildly popular massively multiplayer online games like Second Life, players routinely confuse others' avatars with the humans that control them. This has lead to a number of odd and even criminal behaviors as people confuse Second Life with real life. In August 2008, 33 year old Durham, North Carolina resident Kimberly Jernigan was arrested in Claymont, Delaware for allegedly attempting to abduct her virtual ex-boyfriend from Second Life in real life for the second time in several weeks. Ms. Jernigan is, by the way, married in real life.
Online match-making services such as Match.com and eHarmony.com boast about the thousands of marriages they have facilitated by allowing people to interact online. Online and telephone interactions can be reasonably good substitutes for face-to-face interactions. I met my wife on a plane and then courted her by phone for three months before we met again in person and we've been married for 13 years.
An example most of us have had is working with someone through email. If you are like me, you have had long-running "relationships" with colleagues who you have never, or almost never, met in person. Inevitably, personal details of their lives spill out through these electronic exchanges and often you begin to care about their personal lives, even though they are quite distant from you physically. And if you do meet them in person, it often seems as if you are already good friends.
So why do humans need so little contact to "attach" to others? The human oxytocin system is particularly powerful relative to attachment systems in our mammal cousins because of the extraordinarily long period of human adolescence. Children are essentially parasites on their parents for at least 12 years before reproductive maturity is reached, and often much longer in modern societies. Oxytocin released in the human brain makes us care about children by modulating the brain's reward system: kids are fun (mostly). Besides motivating care for offspring, oxytocin is released in men and women during sexual climax, facilitating long-term bonds.
My lab has shown in the last five years that the oxytocin is a hungry and fuzzy brain system. The oxytocin system is hungry because it is constantly looking for attachment targets. Humans are unique among mammals in that we enjoy being around strangers. A number of studies from my lab have shown that much of the cooperation and reciprocity that underlies our positive interactions with others is mediated by oxytocin. Nature has endowed us with the oxytocin system and we've used it to extract value from friends and strangers alike; for example, by working together. Oxytocin does this by activating reward regions of the brain when we cooperate with strangers. It literally feels good to play nice with others, even when could take advantage of them. For most of us, this keeps our selfish desires in check and allows us to congregate together to accomplish goals.
The human oxytocin system is fuzzy because it is not very fine-tuned when it comes to targets. Anything that has human-like qualities can be an object of attachment. We attach across species, for example, with our pets, and even to inanimate objects. Time to confess: have you named your car? And do you occasionally talk to it (sorry, him or her)? This is oxytocin in action. That a human-like robot will become an attachment target is inevitable. If we as a society should permit android-human marriage is a question we need to address now, before some lonely guy walks down the aisle with his robot bride.
