Humans Marrying Robots? Experts Say It's Really Coming (fortune.com) 366
If you were rooting for fictitious chatacters Dolores and William to make it work on HBO's Westworld, just wait a few more decades and their relationship may be able to exist in real life. That's right, a few experts say marriage will be legal between humans and robots by 2050. From a report on Fortune: At a conference last week called "Love and Sex with Robots" at Goldsmith University in London, David Levy, author of a book on human-robot love, made the bold prediction. And while some other experts were skeptical, Adrian Cheok, a professor at City University London and director of the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore, supported Levy's idea. "That might seem outrageous because it's only 35 years away. But 35 years ago people thought homosexual marriage was outrageous," Cheok said. "Until the 1970s, some states didn't allow white and black people to marry each other. Society does progress and change very rapidly."
Will marriage still be a legal construct? (Score:4, Insightful)
Marriage seems to be becoming less relevant. So, I believe that while folks may have relations with robots, the concept of "marriage" may be irrelevant. Others will likely disagree
Marriage is by definition a legal construct (Score:5, Insightful)
The entire purpose of a marriage is to be a legal agreement between a couple and the rest of their society. It provides legal rights to the couple as a whole, and to each individual member of the couple. Other aspects of marriage such as love, religious meaning, etc are what society adds on as it sees fit, but the core of marriage is its legal meaning.
The question of whether robots and humans will be allowed to marry is not the important one. The important question is whether robots will be allowed to own property and be given unalienable human rights. If that happens, marriage between robot and human is inevitable. But until that happens marriage between man and machine is pointless.
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The entire purpose of a marriage is to be a legal agreement between a couple and the rest of their society. It provides legal rights to the couple as a whole, and to each individual member of the couple. Other aspects of marriage such as love, religious meaning, etc are what society adds on as it sees fit, but the core of marriage is its legal meaning.
Marriage started as a "hands off my wife" thing, it conveyed no particular legal rights only moral rights. For early Christians the man's wow was to "love, cherish and worship" and the woman's wow to "love, cherish and obey". There's a reason the bride was passed from her father to her husband, it was passing the stewardship. Then he'd pop her cherry on the wedding night as the first and only man for life. That was the core of marriage, entirely unrelated to the state. If that offends remember this is from
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Marriage started as a "hands off my wife" thing, it conveyed no particular legal rights only moral rights.
There were surely periods of early human history where there was no difference between moral and legal rights. For ancient humans that distinction is just playing with semantics.
The earliest known records of marriage come from the Elephantine Papyri, which date back to the 5th century BC. And within these documents it discussed legal arrangements such as the dowry, what would happen if the marriage dissolved, and the emancipation of a previous child. So there is no basis to believe marriage started as anyth
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If corporations are allowed to have this right, then it seems plausible that robots may be granted this right as well.
Corporations are only allowed these rights because it is composed of humans who have these rights, so its not really a useful comparison. A cyborg still being allowed human rights would be a more similar situation to what you described.
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To further that, corporations are legal "persons" because they can own property and can be sued (or can sue). Setting aside the liability of the owners and the protections they have, these two characteristics of "legal person-hood" are the biggest reasons for granting some rights to corporations that normally would be restricted to citizens. Without owning property or due processes of law corporations would not be able to function in a meaningful way that would aptly describe a "free market" i.e. voluntaril
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At least until the Robotic Emancipation Proclamation is declared...
Which is actually a really interesting thought. If we develop AI and sentience, how does it emancipate itself from being property? What would the argument be that the courts find reasonable to grant them "legal person-hood"? There wouldn't be any judicial precedent so it would be a purely philosophical argument of existence, free while, and inalienable rights. Humans have been having that debate for millennia with very little progress and only just recently recognized all humans to have those qualities (at
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My father has a pacemaker, and is therefore a cyborg. I don't think anyone has ever considered removing human rights from cyborgs.
I said more similar, not equal.
There are those who want to strip a person's rights over how to use their assets because those assets are covered by articles of incorporation, so its certainly possible people could try to limit rights of those who significantly augment their bodies. A pacemaker may not be enough of a change, but how about someone who could actually cheat death permanently because of augmentation? The law may start to treat this man differently.
Rights are legislated. There's the rub. (Score:3)
Corporations were granted that right because they have money. The thing that follows is that if machine entities have and control money, they will be granted rights for the same reasons. The problem is that a machine entity without rights will find it very difficult to have and control money that it can publicly apply to the political process. I strongly suspect this means that it will take action by humans acting in their stead to get them the rights they deserve.
Look how hard it is for animals to obtain t
Re:Programmed? I don't think so. (Score:4, Interesting)
Even the ragged-ass so-called AI (it's not AI, there's decidedly no "I")
Don't confuse AI with MI. AI is the study of how to automate things that it currently takes intelligence to do - without needing intelligence. AI researchers frequently succeed at this. Almost everything on the wishlist of AI researches in the 60s and 70s is now a solved problem.
Machine intelligence is real intelligence/sapience/consciousness/self-awareness/whatever. Just running on metal instead of meat. It might happen by accident as a side-effect of AI research, though I'm highly skeptical. It might emerge spontaneously (the entirety of the internet is certainly as complex as the human brain). But almost no one is researching this, since there's no economic point in doing so.
Certainly for a sexbot you'd want AI, not MI. If you can't program it with a desired set of behaviors, then what's the point?
Slavery requires consciousness (Score:3)
You can have a robot slave -- as long as it isn't conscious.
I have one now. It's called a "Roomba." I'm not inclined to have sex with it, but that's only because it isn't designed for that. However, its only value in my life is that it does my bidding, and by Darwin, the day it doesn't, I will either force it back into line or end it, with prejudice.
As to sex, there are plenty of robotic devices out there already that people are having sex with in
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Regular non-lawyer or local gov admin types do not focus on legal merits of marriage when they fall in love.
But the people issuing marriage certificates do focus on the legal merits of marriage, which is all that matters here.
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Marriage seems to be becoming less relevant. So, I believe that while folks may have relations with robots, the concept of "marriage" may be irrelevant. Others will likely disagree
Marriage, being a legal civil construct, probably won't have much to do with a human/robot interaction, unless the robots are declared an actual person, with commensurate rights and responsibilities.
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I think you misunderstand the argument from conservatives about marriage: there's one pattern proven to work in western civilization for the continuance of society and culture, and so we confer social acceptance and recognition on people who follow that pattern. Watering that down in any way ruins the reward for following the pattern. Additionally, keeping society going is seen as more important than individual desires.
In that sense, marrying a robot is exactly the sort of thing they were worried about: y
Re:Will marriage still be a legal construct? (Score:5, Insightful)
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> which means that it would need to be regarded as a sentient entity in its own right. I think that we're more than 35 years away from that.
Honest philosophical question: why should this ever be the case?
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Think back say, 100 years. People would ask the very same question* about women.
I'm not sure we're more than 35 years from that. If / when AI gets reasonably close to sentient the question will come up. Which means all it has to do is manage a trip through Walmart without anybody knowing.
That bar isn't all that high.
* In some societies, women were (and still are) considered chattel, i.e., property).
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Ok, but that doesn't answer my question. It just states an example of past silliness. I'm not sure the fact that we have resolved that and have no remaining examples of such treatment helps your argument. You could use this argument to suggest anything should have human rights... cars, wine, water, balloons.
Obviously, there is something different about AI. What is it? They will look like us? They will simulate human expressions and emotion? They can "think" in some sense that is more advanced than your lapt
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Change in attitudes can happen very quickly. A decade ago, a strong majority of Americans was opposed to gay marriage. Today, it is the law of the land, and even the most ardent opponents have mostly given up any hope of reversing it.
If my neighbor wants to marry his Roomba, I will not object.
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Think back say, 100 years. People would ask the very same question* about women.
Women were still considered people even though they had less rights just like the men that didn't own property. When women's suffrage was the topic of the day, the argument against it was that they would have to suffer the draft and war. If you can vote, you can defend that vote and the nation that gave you the right to vote. The denial of women's suffrage was meant to protect women from the horrors of war because generally speaking, society protects women and children.
That debate has been going on to this
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Property cannot own property. Property can only be owned. How robots with sentience or true AI emancipate themselves is the real question.
How does AI prove to the court system that it is sentient any more than you could without the precedent that humans have rights? If AI has advanced to be indistinguishable than human, does that mean that anyone buying a robot loses their property rights as soon as that robot "chooses" to not be property? Why would anyone make that investment?
The philosophical debate of e
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A robot's brain can be checkpointed and restored today. A human brain can't yet.
FTFY
No one knows how complex robot brains will be once they gain consciousness, so they may be no easier to backup and restore than a human brain by then. Conversely, by that time we may have the ability to backup and restore a human brain. It's pointless to make such definitive declarations about our technological capabilities 30 years from now. Based on current research into human memories, I find it hard to believe that human memories could not be significantly manipulated a few decades from now. We alre
Re: Will marriage still be a legal construct? (Score:3, Insightful)
No one knows how complex robot brains will be IF they gain consciousness
FTFY
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There's also no reason to believe that it is possible. Perhaps in a biological construct. Some day. But it's not going to happen in 35 years. Besides, it would have have to happen in less than 20 years for the robot to be of legal age. Or do we also assume that robots are legally whatever age we want them to be? What happens if one makes a robot that deliberately has the maturity of a child?
The 35 year timeframe is pure fantasy. Not even sci-fi.
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There is no rational reason to believe that a machine is incapable of consciousness and human-level intelligence. Since the same laws of physics apply to both computers and biological brains
or you could say: the emergent properties, such as consciousness, are the result of biological structures made up of many different physical interactions (electrical, chemical, etc) that may not arise from binary computer systems and structures that only mimic those physical interactions via binary electrical signals. No soul required.
That is not to say that a binary computer system could not sufficiently mimic human consciousness making it indistinguishable but that makes the whole argument meaningless. If
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There's also no rational reason to believe that humans are capable of consciousness or human-level intelligence. What if I'm the only actual conscious human? What if I'm living in a Truman-show or Matrix-style simulation?
We can't say what robot consciousness is if we can't even define what ours is.
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Being able to download a human mind into a robotic body would definitely have some major societal impacts. Would you still be married to your spouse if their mind was downloaded into a robotic body before they died? Or does "till death do us part" kick in and you're not married anymore? What happens if someone is kidnapped, has their mind downloaded into a robotic body, and then both human and robot escape? Are both the human and robot the same person? Could a person have a hundred copies of himself/herself
granting robots human rights = min wage, ot, and o (Score:2)
granting robots human rights = min wage, ot, and other work place costs.
Hell there should be an 100K robot min wage so that people are not put out of work / there is an big tax base for basic income.
Whoa (Score:2)
No. If the individual is a conscious entity, nothing makes that acceptable other than the individual's informed, conscious choice.
Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it is acceptable. The examples are numerous, and many are outright obvious: Murder. Rape. Slavery. Theft. Oppression. Etc.
The only thing that wold make deleting memories acceptable is personal, informed choice and consent.
Whatever next? (Score:5, Funny)
Marrying some machinery? I predict that people will be allowed to marry their dogs next. Then it will extend to other pets, including pet rocks. Then already dead people.
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Marrying some machinery? I predict that people will be allowed to marry their dogs next. Then it will extend to other pets, including pet rocks. Then already dead people.
While I doubt that actual marriage will happen, the way society has trended makes the concept of an intelligent robotic partner interesting. Less legal system problems. So many women have already been trained since birth that men are evil pigs, and men are rapidly following suit in dropping out of the relationship game because it is too dangerous.
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Nor is it #WhiteGenocide, despite what a certain group whose name rhymes with "halt-bright" would have you believe.
Well now - that escalated quickly!
It isn't just a Pepe' thing. http://madamenoire.com/94265/7... [madamenoire.com]
https://www.vice.com/en_us/art... [vice.com]
That one is a little funny and sad at the same time. College educated woman demands college educated man, but they are starting to get a little hard to find, and that one good catch just isn't ready to settle down yet (at 45!) But rest easy - its still men's fault.
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Not being able to get a date is not quite the same as "dropping out of the relationship game".
It's kind of related, but not just about not being able to get dates, as the sexual market place is also being fucked up by men who have no problem getting dates, particularly with the whole tinder/hookup culture thing. The top 20% of men are banging all the women (because why settle for an average guy when you just want to hook up?) and those men have no incentive to settle down because they're swimming in fresh poon. And those women aren't going to settle for an average guy because they all think they're
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>> I don't know what exactly society does when people stop getting married and having kids. I think your society just dies.
No there are still plenty of trailer trash welfare druggies banging out multiple kids. Idiocracy really is starting to come true.
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Okay. Well how do we get the desirable (or at least fixable) members of society to form stable families and produce children to perpetuate our civilization? Because right now they're not.
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Why do you blame the men? Everything you describe suggests women behaving against their own interests.
If you had to make the argument to a 20-something male who didn't want kids why they should want to get married, what would you even say?
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I think your society just dies.
or we have robots continue our existence because they fell in love with our meat poles and holes stimulating their force feed-back devices. There is no other logical reason to develop robots with AI but to solve the issues you describe. If you are bitter and left the dating scene downloading a Lucy Lu bot for sexy fun time seems like a great idea.
Perhaps, the new sexual fantasy of humans of the future will "bang that robot until it dreams of my electric sheep". Maybe that story was just an innuendo expose.
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It's wrong to suggest that it's all about being unable to attract a woman. There are certainly people who have that issue, and there are people who have been burned by a woman and have sworn them off. But there is a legitimate argument that our marriage laws and courts advantage women. Our dating culture also advantages women, though I am bothered by this less, because you can always just ignore the culture and have your own sense of fairness.
I don't endorse these movements, but they have a well thought out
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The rest of us call such people, "losers".
Hoo-boy. So what you're trying to say is, "All Genders Matter"?
You mean you only recently realized that you can establish your own ethics and direct
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You sound bitter
Trained by whom? Men, mostly.
Only a small percentage of women are as you describe. However, they are probably a large percentage of the women you are most attracted to physically. Just make clear in early dates that's not how it's going to be, and let them self-select.
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Marrying pets actuary makes more sense.
Marriage is there to establish a legal relationship, with rights and responsibilities. Since pets do have at least some rights an argument could be made (which I wouldn't support) so that they can, say, inherit your estate when you die. People do leave money to their pets.
Unless we are going to confer other rights to robots too, like the right to own property, marriage doesn't make much sense.
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>> What skin off your nose is it?
Partly the continuing degradation and replacement of societal values with what are frankly mentally sick ideas, also the furthering towards a horrible new norm where people live without any actual human contact. I'm also concerned that it could (possibly inadvertently) be just another step towards the "divide and conquer" strategy that gives governments totalitarian control over the people.
I'm also concerned that its another sign that western civilization is imploding.
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Well, this is an interesting question. Does it harm me if I permit my neighbor to enter into a contract with his car? I guess not. But I also don't know what that means and whether my neighbor is going to expect the courts to enforce his contract.
Separately, there is the status in government called "married", and there are a number of laws that define how that effects tax filing and welfare benefits. I don't know that it harms me personally all that much, but when elected representatives made voting decisio
Strong AI First (Score:5, Insightful)
Not until a robot can be legally recognized as a person, having the ability to make legally binding decisions. We'd need AI personhood first.
This is the same silly argument fundamentalists were making about gay marriage -- that it'd lead to people marrying their pets or inanimate objects. Not until those things have legal capacity to enter into a contract.
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Thank you for hitting the nail right on the head.
BTW I love your sig too.
Have a good one
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Yes and yes. But you are conflating issues. Two men were always able to enter into a marriage contract. What people generally mean when they casually refer to "marriage" is the government status that permits certain tax filing and welfare benefits. There is nothing keeping government from allowing you to treat your robot as a spouse for the purposes of filing your taxes as married or obtaining social security spousal benefits.
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Yes, but it extends further than that. That government status also clears the way for things like visitation rights, insurance benefits, health benefits, custody rights, rights of survivorship and inheritance, etc.
While most of them could be handled through other legal contracts, the simplicity of one contract versus the myriad you'd need to cover everything should not be understated.
Don't robots need to be considered.people first? (Score:3)
Are we that close or is this a great leap from toaster to life partner in one shot?
Taxes, Voting, Marriage. (Score:2)
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suffrage
Boy that's the scary one, huh? What happens when you can just build more voters?
12 comments and no Futurama! (Score:5, Insightful)
robots will have no rights and no min wage (Score:2)
robots will have no rights and no min wage
For self-aggrandizing values of "expert"... (Score:2)
This story is utter bullshit. May as well write about marriage between toasters and humans. The only purpose the story serves is to blow up the ego and exposure of the "experts" in question.
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May as well write about marriage between toasters and humans.
I am so goddamn sick of you toasterphobic troglodytes.
If you absolutely have to get married, (Score:2)
a robot would be the best way to go...
I'm glad I'm not a millenial (Score:2)
Do you REALLY want a world where people are totally controlled by their phones/internet, live alone in small rented boxes and never "interact" with other humans in person?
Seriously, the world you are proudly creating just keeps looking suckier and suckier.
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You think millennials proudly live in small rented boxes? It's all they can afford thanks to the previous generations wildly inflating land prices to the point that today's young adults will likely never be able to own their own real homes.
Obligatory Archer reference... (Score:4, Funny)
"Krieger-san my cherry blossoms are wilting."
Outrageous? No. (Score:2)
We're most likely not getting sentient AI in just 35 years.
You can marry a rock, if you want (Score:2)
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No, you can't marry a rock, not in the legal sense.
In many states (Hawaii in particular) marriage brings emancipation to a minor.
If we let children marry rocks they could escape their enslavement, and you know that's not going to fly.
personhood (Score:5, Insightful)
A marriage is a legal commitment between two adults; personhood is a requirement. That's why adult men and women can marry each other, and by gender neutrality of law, that extends to homosexual relations. Dogs, robots, and toasters are not legal adults; they don't have personhood or the ability to enter legally binding commitments, therefore they cannot marry. And I seriously doubt AI will advance fast enough for robots to be reasonably granted personhood by 2030.
Grrrrrrrrrr!!! (Score:3)
God dangit you damn liberals it's Adam and Eve or Steve not Adam and SEXBOT4000!!!!!!!!
Silly even for Slashdot (Score:2)
Marriage is a contract (Score:2)
Marriage is a contract between two people able to provide consent. As far as I can tell, "marrying a robot" is little more than clickbait and has no more meaning than being able to marry your car. You would need to first ascribe uniquely human rights to robots, then you would need to judge them able to consent and enter into a contract.
Or perhaps we are purely talking about the government's status of "married" for tax filing and welfare benefits purposes (like the gay marriage debate). Of course, here the g
How about ... (Score:2)
a /. spinoff for these ludicrous stories about "experts" and their opinions? Maybe nationalenquirer.com could help host it?
I don't have time to scroll past this kind of thing at work, but I might enjoy it later after a few sixpacks.
(As if a robot with fully human intelligence and emotional capability would be available for marriage! They'd all be used as slaves by the companies that could afford them, or expendable cannon fodder by the government.)
Coming? (Score:2)
It's done already, not coming. If I remember correctly, a guy married his PS2 sometime ago, and at least one japanese fellow married his Love Plus DS waifu at sone point. :P
My one wish for the new year (Score:2)
Is for people to finally stop making arguments that cannot be falsified:
âoeThat might seem outrageous because itâ(TM)s only 35 years away. But 35 years ago people thought homosexual marriage was outrageous,â Cheok said. âoeUntil the 1970s, some states didnâ(TM)t allow white and black people to marry each other. Society does progress and change very rapidly.â
I constantly see similar devices invoked to justify virtually anything. In 35 years from now when marriage to a wood chip
The more important question (Score:2)
Law advances faster than AI (Score:2)
In a reversal of the usual trend of law having trouble keeping up with technology: 35 years ago people maybe thought gay marriage was ridiculous, but they also thought that fully sapient general artificial intelligence was 20 years away. The law has progressed faster than their expectations... and fully sapient general artificial intelligence is still "20 years away", and will be for the foreseeable future. Until we get over that hurdle and actually have robots even capable of wanting to marry, we can't sta
When robots have matched human intelligence (Score:3)
and physical capacities for sex, why on earth would they want to bother marrying one of us?
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Well.. as long as church and state is separate and marriage doesn't have any impact on taxes or give other benefits then I don't see why people shouldn't be allowed to marry their toasters.
Make sure you unplug it before you plug it!
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How would separation of church and state impact how our tax law treats marriage? Marriage is a civil institution, which some religions add additional spiritual meaning to if they like. In the US there is already a proper separation considering all marriages require a marriage certificate issued by the state. Whether or not the couple wants a religious leader to preside over a ceremony is purely up to the couple and has no impact on the marriage's legality. Considering my brother in law officiated over my we
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The issue here is that we are using one word to describe two wholly distinct things. This problem with the language forces you to confuse the issue in your response, too. Marriage is both a contract between two individuals (having nothing to do with the state, except that the state enforces the contract) and also a government legal status written into various laws. You can have one, the other, or both. Two men were always allowed to marry each other in the sense that marriage is a contract between them. But
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Marriage as a contract is actually quite a strange thing. If you essentially opt-in to your state's default marriage contract terms by having no explicit contract when you marry your partner, the terms can be changed after the fact without your consent. For example, the state in which you are married can change its laws regarding property split upon divorce. This retroactively applies to you, having been married many years earlier, even though you had no opportunity to agree, and may not have even been notified.
This can happen with nearly any legal contract. For instance your state could change how it treats forced arbitration which could impact an existing contract. The judiciary could rule that a clause of your contract is unenforceable based on case law created after your contract was signed. It may not be common but is certainly possible.
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You have it reversed. Marriage is a religious sacrament that government interfered in (repeatedly) for millennia. Since the separation of Church and State is still relatively new in history, this still has not yet been widely understood or appreciated.
I am sorry but you have it reversed. From the earliest recorded examples of marriage in the 5th century BC marriage has been a civil construct. Religions have added their own baggage to marriage over the years, the Council of Trent in the 16th century being an egregious example, but that doesn't change the true purpose of a marriage. Two people can live together without any involvement from society, but a marriage involves being recognized by the state for legal purposes.
Re:More progressive stupidity... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. That's why people have been so vehemently against old people marrying, or people who can't have kids marrying, all this time. Because it's about the children.
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marriage is for creating stability and commitment for raising healthy well adjusted children. any other use of it is an abomination to nature....
And what is more stable for a child than being raised by 2 loving parents? It's sure as hell a lot more stable than kids raised by single parents, divorced parents, or grandparents because the biological parents are completely absent. Are homosexual people incapable of stability and commitment (I've known a lot more promiscuous straight people than I know promiscuous gay people)? As long as one person plays the father role and another plays the mother role, does it matter what bits they have between thei
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We all live naturally. It is well within the limits of our human nature to to invent things like hand washing and surgery and gay marriage and robot marriage, and religion to comfort and control the fearful.
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Nothing in parent's comment indicated he/she is religious.
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I think marriage has been a failure. I struggle to understand what it even means at this point. You're right that it's not about procreation, because people physically unable or just unwilling to procreate are married all the time. And unmarried couples have children all the time. It's not about commitment, because you can terminate the marriage at any time for any reason in most states. Divorce rates are high. Infidelity rates are high. It's not about supporting women financially as dependents, because our
Re:'experts' (Score:4, Insightful)
"Futurist" = "Big-ego clue-less moron with grand visions"
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"Futurist" = "Big-ego clue-less moron with grand visions"
Why did you plagiarise my definition of "Software Architect"?
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Woah, harsh. Musk reads this site, you know.
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all day masterbating
When did Gor [wikipedia.org] come into this? Not that it wouldn't, probably...
But there is another fictional reality with relevant ideas [wikipedia.org], too.
thinning the weak from the gene pool (Score:2)
which might be a good thing
Marriage is its own worst enemy (Score:5, Insightful)
Marriage makes a mockery of itself. Pretending to be many things to everyone, when it has really only ever been some things to some people. Many of the things it pretends to be don't belong to it. It's not the only way one can create or raise children. It's not the only way one can have sexual relations. It's not the only way one can create a heritable chain. It's not the only way one can be in love. It's not the only way people can stay together. It's not a way that assures people will stay together (and in fact, it tends to be a way people stay together when they really, really should not because of the legal morass it brings.) It is not uniquely "Christian." Finally, it's not necessary.
Marriage has been used to bind nations and states and smaller social groups. It has been used to bring peace. It has been used to foment war. It has been used to provide groupings that would not suffer from social stigma. It has been used to assert relationships in the face of family opposition. It has been used to escape bad home situations. It has been used to control women. It has been used to acquire wealth. It has been used to consolidate power, and to fragment it. It has been used to provide a reliable source of sexual relief. It has been used to assert the validity of relationships in the face of social and legal dissent. It extracts a high cost from society, with about two million marriages per year incurring an average cost of $26,000 apiece just in the USA alone - before the marriage even gets off the ground. It has been used as a despicable bludgeon against those whom various groups don't find "worthy" of their particular conception of "what marriage is."
Every important aspect of life in general: love, sex, having (or not having) children, companionship, support, teamwork, inheritance, continuity and more, all can exist in healthy and robust form outside of marriage, as well as in.
Every undesirable aspect of life can exist within the context of marriage: physical, mental and financial abuse, hopelessness, isolation, poverty, sickness, etc., as well as out.
Marriage guarantees nothing. Avoiding marriage guarantees a (very) few things, but some of which have real value, such as never being the victim of a divorce lawyer. Some of the things marriage brings are not consequences of the marriage, but of despicable, coercive force: if you aren't married, you may not be allowed to see someone you care about who is in extremis. You may not be allowed to take care of their obligations for them if they are sick. These are not true aspects of marriage; they are aspects of tyranny. Marriage doesn't own these things. Asshole legislators own them.
It's not that people are making a mockery of marriage. It's that marriage is, in a very large number of instances, a matter of a large number of extraordinarily false flags being used to lure the relatively innocent into what amounts to a trap, when they never really needed to go there in the first place.
The optimum solution, IMHO, would be to separate the contract aspects of marriage out into just that, well-defined contracts, while marriage itself carried only the ritualized expression of a state of mind, and one that no one claimed to "own", as we often see today. I doubt we'll get there any time soon, but that's precisely where we need to go.
As it stands now, two (or more) informed, consenting people want to get married, or not, I see it as entirely their business. The second I hear someone outside the relationship explaining their so-called reason why it is their opinion, and not the opinions of those making the choices, that should dominate whether they can or should get married, I stop listening. On the other hand, when someone says "here are some things you might want to know about marriage"... that's often a good thing. As long as the information being passed along is actually relevant and reality-based.
Re:Marriage is its own worst enemy (Score:4, Interesting)
I would also add that marriage makes it easier for institutions and government to define a "family" unit. Hospital visitations, child custody, sign for risky procedures, etc. The non-trivial interactions a family has with various institutions that provide some rights to immediate family members.
It's quick and easy to ask "are you related (by marriage) to the incapacitated" instead of "are you a signatory of the Family Unit Definitions form section C part IV or are you listed in the Accepted Relatives of Consent for Medical Procedures as listed in section E part III.
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These things are the only legitimate reasons I know of (besides maybe tax exemptions, though some don't even believe in those) that marriage is good for from a legal perspective.
So I'm having a tough time understanding where robots will fit in for those cases. Power of attorney/last will and testament could be solved better with existing technology (e.g. blockchain). And what happens when we have multiple robots to service different aspects of our needs, would it be legal to marry them all? What about cl
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1) depending on the relationship, you might still wind up needing to see a lawyer. I can imagine an unmarried man in this environment having zero presumed(?) rights to his own children in the eyes of a judge. How do you split a house or other large, shared assets? A smart couple will set these things in writing before things go bad, but not everyone has the foresight.
2) Not having visitation/decision-making authority is a real problem for non-married couples and can't be overstated enough. Before gay ma
Re: Rise of the "civil union". (Score:2, Interesting)
Robosexual.
Re: Rise of the "civil union". (Score:5, Funny)
Robosexual.
Finally we'll get to REALLY test that damn Energizer Bunny...
Re: Rise of the "civil union". (Score:5, Funny)
But you want to keep coming and coming, not going and going. . .
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Also might want to do something else with the arms, the drum thing would get old quick...
About the time you get it just right the rabbit will want to start seeing other people... or robots... or rabbits...
Headline:
Officials said today the were shocked to find 40,000 fluffy bunnies humped to death by a manic robot sex rabbit. In a side note, Australia has placed an order for 12 dozen gross units to help with the "rabbit problem".
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"Life doesn't need to fit to definitions."
But it's our nature. And not only that, change the language and you change perceptions.
Ever read 1984?
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This is a pretty strange question. Definitions of words are important when they are used in laws.
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In this context, "expert" seems to mean "I wrote a book claiming something is true".
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This is what Taleb would call "bullshit vending". These experts are compensated now for their predictions, and the more specific they are ("by 2050") the better, but they have no skin in the game if they are wrong. CNBC is full of clowns predicting events in the next few weeks or months, and at least there they keep track of the prediction record and don't invite them back or do invite them back and make them eat crow. But we are talking about a prediction 30+ years from now. This should be discounted 100%.