[tt] [NSG] Meeting Announcement 02/05

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com> -----

From: Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 11:17:21 -0500
To: nsg at marshome.org
Subject: [NSG] Meeting Announcement 02/05
X-Mailer: MessagingEngine.com Webmail Interface
Reply-To: Nanotechnology Study Group <nsg at marshome.org>


Meeting notice: The 080205 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the
Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of
Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the
manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below.

Suggested topic:  Love and Sex with Robots

I have just finished reading, and will bring with me, David Levy's book
by that title.

I had planned not to read it, since I couldn't imagine what Levy could
possibly have to say that wasn't either obvious or unknowable, but I
ended up paging through it anyway.

On the one hand, my intuition was at least superficially right:
obviously some people are going to have relationships with robots,
because some people buy sex dolls right now.  Nothing interesting
about that.

What would be interesting is the correlation between the rate of
adoption and the features and skill levels likely to drive that rate.
Will manipulators drive the market more strongly than language
recognition or kinesthetics more than vision?  Who knows?  Levy
certainly doesn't; he doesn't even speculate on the topic.

What jumps out of the book is how weirdly passionate Levy is about the
topic; almost touchingly so.  While he doesn't have much to say that is
new, (plus he leans over backwards not to talk about himself and his own
fetishes, which is a shame) you do walk away with the conviction that
the social history of this subject is going to be both incendiary and
totally unpredictable.  I can almost imagine society's passing a law
against having sex with robots on the grounds that robots, being
machines, have no ability to give consent.  I think it is going to get
that bizarre.

On a related matter, Chuck Lewin (of Art Interactive) is going to be
addressing the Grey Thumb Society on "Love in the Age of Computation".
His talk starts at 7 at The Asgard Irish Pub & Restaurant (350 Mass.
Av.). I expect to catch the first hour, at which point I will walk down
Main to the Royal East, getting there at 8:15.  Anyone who wants to join
me would of course be welcome.

<+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+>

In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the
moon.

                                -- Jules Verne, 1865

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Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on the
first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which
refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little
else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a
sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg'  to
majordomo at polymathy.org.  Unsubs follow the same model.

Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to:
nsg at pobox.com. www.pobox.com/~fhapgood   www.pobox.com/~fhapgood




http://www.BostonScienceAndEngineeringLectures.com
http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood

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----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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