Jul 30 2008
How Homosexuals are Like Robots
Okay, I’ve got your attention. At least you don’t have to wait until the 11:00 news to find out what I mean. But you will have to be a bit patient.
Judging by my own experience, and by recent article posts over at ScienceDaily, the day of robot is dawning.
To a great degree, I think it’s a good thing. For example, in the article, “Meet Robo Habilis: Robot Has Human-like Hand Controlled By ‘Brain’ Modeled After Human Cerebellum” we discover that better and better robotic arms, and methods for controlling them, are being developed. This is a tremendous advance for those who have lost limbs.
Yet a second article on robotics made me flinch with a “wait a minute,” In “Emotional Robots: Software Empowers Robots To Learn When A Person Is Sad, Happy Or Angry” we learn that robots and perhaps automated software may start to respond not simply to the words we speak, but how we speak them.
Okay, the helpline of my satellite television provider has an automated system that asks for voice prompts, rather than requiring me to punch in “4″ for “troubleshooting.” Instead, I say “troubleshooting,” and after a brief pause I hear, “Okay, I think I can help you with that.” And I am prompted to say something else that, hopefully, the sound-recognition software will identify.
Convenient, yes. But the “I think I can help you,” REALLY bugs me. Why? Because there is no “I” there. It’s just software. I have a real beef about being deceived. And that’s my beef about the coming robotics. I don’t want to be deceived into treating a machine as if it were human when it is not.
Here’s where homosexuality comes in. The fields of evolutionary psychology and primatology have revealed that social apes have an instinct for detecting when we are being deceived. And for being motivated to avoid circumstances in which we may be deceived.
Robots aren’t real human beings. I don’t want to be fooled into thinking so. And homosexuals? This is total speculation here, but I have a feeling that the gut, heterosexual aversion I may have to, say, another man making a pass at me, is based upon detecting deceit. The homosexual male is not someone to mate with (at least not for a heterosexual male), nor is he competitor for mates, so what is he to me? Some small, ancient part of my brain smells a fraud.
Intellectually and socially I’ve got absolutely no problem with homosexual males. (And on both the unconscious and intellectual level I have no problem with homosexual females. They don’t seem to trip the same deceit-detection instinct. Or perhaps another part of my brain overrides it. Maybe the “it looks like a female, maybe I can mount it,” part.) In terms of interpersonal interactions, however, homosexuality may cause confusion in me.
While my intellect believes in full civil rights for homosexuals, including to marry and adopt children, and I could vote for a homosexual candidate for president without batting an eye, there are many parts to my brain, whether I like it or not.
