What if androids out-perform humans at interpersonal relationships?
Some of the answers to this question got me thinking:
Customer service, emergency services, and doctor's bedside manner can be programmed and tuned for the task rather than having whatever-we-got from different individual people. It makes sense that they will be optimized and improved, and be free of their own baggage during interactions. Talking to an AI in a stressful situation will end up being much better than talking with a typical human!
For their own side of the conversation, the human won't have to work to be good at interposonal skills. The robot will take all the burden of it, and the human won't have to be "nice" or not talk about himself too much or avoid annoying habbits, etc. The people will lose their incentive to having and maintaining these skills.
So the RealWifeBot2000 sounds like a good idea: other people will be downright annoying and "difficult" after talking to robots for everything.
If robots become ubiquitous and much better at interposonal interaction than humans, how will this affect society?
It would be interesting to speculate both on near-term people can't hold customer-facing jobs as well as far future people never interact directly with each other societies.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/34374. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Because the android can be whatever you want it to be, I think the personality will be modular, and that people will be able to buy personality types that they want or that will fit their mood that day.
Some people would want a subservient android. Some would want to be dominated by their android. Some would want a quiet android that just listens. Others might want one that talks without prompting.
I feel that a lot of people that don't socialize much are that way because they don't have the self confidence to do it. They aren't used to talking to others, or in front of others, and so it's hard to put themselves out there.
By getting an android that is molded to their personality, they would get practice interacting with others, and can work at building up self confidence.
There could also be modules that are designed to help with social interaction, and very gently help fix minor personality issues.
It could be a kind of training wheels for relationships.
Short term, I can see people getting very attached to their android.
But over time it'll fade, just like a crush might, and so that may be a way to take the training wheels off and graduate to a real relationship.
I also think, short term, that a lot of customer facing jobs would go to androids.
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