Parisian think tank Havas have conducted a study which suggests that 27% of 18-34 year olds would date a robot.
Human relationships can sometimes pose a threat to our sanity, and we often tend to be attracted to the wrong people. But the fact that over a quarter of the 12,000 participants surveyed were open to a rendez-vous with an android comes as a surprise.
British men were three times more likely to be interested in the possibility than British women. Men also tended to prefer virtual reality to real life, with 20% more males than females claiming that they enjoyed online life to life off-line.
Artificial intelligence is predicted to have an enormous impact on our romantic lives in future, with experts claiming that virtual sex will be as widespread as watching porn by 2030, and 'sexbots' expected to be introduced in high-income households by 2035, according to the Daily Mail. Research also predicts at human-robot interaction will be fully normalised in only a matter of decades, sex with robots becoming more popular than human-to-human sex by 2050.
Definitely food for thought, especially since that these relationships are unchartered territory. What will the dynamics be like when a robot is essentially programmed to be fall in love with you? Is it really a romantic relationship if both parties have not mutually agreed to get together? And what happens if (or when) artificial intelligence becomes conscious? Many would find the prospect scary, but Adrian Cheok, a professor at City University London and director of the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore, says that human relationships can be problematic too. '“A lot of human marriages are very unhappy,” he said in an interview with Quartz. “Compared to a bad marriage, a robot will be better than a human.”
Looks like 27% of millennials agree.
The questions were part of a larger study on how technology has affected human interaction. Despite the controversy surrounding robots, participants seemed to reach a consensus on other topics, especially the constant use of smartphones in the modern age, which 70% of the group believed to weaken human relationships.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.