Yup, as in Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson in the prescient 2013 movie, “Her.” For shut-ins. For hospitals. For schools, babysitting, factory efficiency, consulting and companionship in 27 delicious flavors.
And that’s just the beginning. Contemplating our shared existence with bots of all kinds, virtual and physical, quickly goes from practical to critical, sensual to tactical. We’re already on a mad intellectual property race. Adding sentience and physicality seems like an unlimited connection to a sci-fi future that has always been distant and whimsical. Now it’s just a matter of a few years.
By 2030, we’ll have babysitters for the kids, cooks in the kitchen and companions of all stripe and color.
Imagine choosing your new best friend at BestBuy and adding the five-year Geek Squad maintenance plan to keep Fred fully and faithfully friendly. This is the cure for loneliness. For learning, expanding the boundaries of modern living, testing the boundaries of modern loving. Who’s to say that a robot which has sufficiently reached a human parity of singularity couldn’t be an ideal life partner, capable of erasing one annoying human habit after another until you’ve literally keystroked your ideal into existential existence, weaving a core of simpatico and love in its wake?
And it’s happening at, well, a perfect moment of unbalanced need worldwide. Everywhere population shifts are notching precipitous drops in marriages, plummeting births and chronic shortages in our cultural and practical workplaces. Why couldn’t your manufactured companion rescue us from ruin and make the world that much easier to navigate? Speculation runs rampant as a tipping point like no other approaches.