10 Ways Robots Will Change All Our Lives Forever
1. The Psychological Effects
The future might be robotic, but what effect will it have on our minds?
Most people wouldn't imagine that having an android to do their housework would have anything to do with their psyche, but there are some experts out there that think we should think seriously and carefully about not only how good robots are for our daily lives, but our souls.
There are some issues with getting robots, particularly ones that are even remotely humanoid, to carry out the menial tasks in the workplace, home or even the bedroom. The kind of relationship formed between a robot of this kind and its owner is something of a master/slave dynamic. No matter how mentally robust a person imagines themself to be, having mastery over something else that appears to have a sembalence of humanity in it will do something to the psyche.
The fact that robots (for all our best efforts) are still unable to think and feel on the level of humans is how we are able use them as objects in a way that wouldn't be acceptable to use a human. However, our propensity to project our qualities onto robots (i.e. giving them faces and names) has the potential to skew our perspectives of dominance and submission in humans.
There are some that even think that this could be having a negative effect on gender stereotypes as almost all humanoid androids used for carry out day-to-day tasks are male formed, but put breasts on it and it's a sex robot. Not only that, but one that you can totally dominate with impunity.
We're not talking here about the "robot rights" debates that always spring up in dystopian future fiction. This is not a concern for how our actions will affect our robotic servants, but how becoming accustomed to total dominance would affect us as humans. As much as we like to think so, humans are highly social and are not just logical beings, and we have a propensity to project ourselves onto inanimate objects. This combined with absolute authority is enough to turn anybody's head.
We aren't robots, after all.