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Artificial Intimacy offers an innovative perspective on the possibilities of the present and near future. The evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks explores the latest research on intimacy and desire to consider how new technologies and fundamental human behaviors interact. He details how existing artificial intelligences can already learn and exploit human social needs?and are getting better at what they do. Brooks combines an understanding of core human traits from evolutionary biology with analysis of how cultural, economic, and technological contexts shape the ways people express them. Beyond the technology, he asks what the implications of artificial intimacy will be for how we understand ourselves.
List of contents
Introduction: In the beginning ¿
1. Meet the dollbots
2. It¿s not about the robot
3. Groom your friends
4. The intimacy algorithm
5. How did sex become so complicated?
6. When artificial intimacy goes bad
7. Ploughs, pills and porn: How technology changes sex
8. Tomorrow¿s moral panic will be just like yesterday¿s
9. Make war not love
10. A Fembot army to disarm the InCel insurrection
11. There¿s no such thing as free love
12. A future in four fictions
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
Index
About the author
Rob Brooks is Scientia Professor of Evolution at the University of New South Wales, where he founded and directed the Evolution and Ecology Research Centre. He is the author of
Sex, Genes, & Rock ¿n¿ Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World (2011).
Summary
The evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks explores the latest research on intimacy and desire to consider how new technologies and fundamental human behaviors interact. He details how existing artificial intelligences can already learn and exploit human social needs—and are getting better at what they do.
Additional text
An in depth and well-researched narrative. An excellent book.
