I was fortunate enough to get invited by Niels Hansa, the speaker liaison for TEDx Vienna on March 9, 2016. The conference was held on May 6th, 2016, titled: “The Future of Intimacy”.
I spend some time to come up with the title, topic and synopsis.
Title #1
File > Save As > Intimacy:
What is Intimacy without humanity?
Title #2
Making Friends by Making Them
Explore the awkward edges of human and robot interaction, and reflect our vulnerability.
Topic How does technology create complicated pleasure causing us to feel both comfort and discomfort and how we manufacture normalcy to mitigate the discomfort.
Future of intimacy and humanity. With robots becoming more and more human like and humans becoming more adoptive to machines, will we eventually learn humanity through machines?
Synopsis
All humans crave relationships that feel comfortable. Wanting to belong is inherent in our social nature. Human to human interaction is critical to mental health, but what about human to machine interaction? To the extent that we are replacing our most intimate human relationships with machine interactions, are we robbing life of its meaning? To investigate these questions, I have created something I call Robotic Intimacy Technology. An example of this is the Last Moment Robot, a device designed to comfort a dying patient when there is a shortage of nurses.
As human beings, we have a tendency to project our humanity onto objects. I have created a series of functional robots capable of harnessing our mental projections to mimic fundamental social behaviors. I create these objects to investigate and reveal how social intimacy is constructed. Ultimately, I would like to ask: What is intimacy without humanity?