Exploring the Uncanny Valley

Freeditorial published Retro VR as my entry in their Long Short Story Contest.

The story addresses adult themes, including pornography addiction, human trafficking and hardness of heart.

I got the idea for the story when I read a New York Times article last summer about a guy making sex robots. This paragraph caught my attention:

"One of the challenges that Mr. McMullen will have to contend with is the so-called uncanny valley. It is a concept first written about in 1970 by a Japanese researcher, that says people’s responses to robots will shift sharply from empathy to revulsion the more closely the robots resemble humans. In other words, something robotic that looks alive, but is not completely convincing, will creep people out." ("Sex Dolls That Talk Back," Emma Cott, The New York Times, June 11, 2015)

I experienced an uncanny valley a few years before I read the article, when a coworker showed me an ad in a newspaper insert. The ad was for dolls that were very close replicas of newborn infants. I never saw one of the dolls in person, but the photograph in the ad made me cringe.

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Let the churches do it

Kim Davis, the county clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, is not the only public official to refuse to perform or certify marriages. This should come as no surprise; marriage has always been both religious ritual and legal contract. It was inevitable that the two would collide in a republic in which citizens disagree about the appropriate degree of separation between church and state. We can resolve this conflict by getting government out of the business of recognizing marriages.

Civil marriage is becoming obsolete. Human beings invented marriage to legitimize sexual relationships in order to hold parents responsible for the care and upbringing of children. Our idea of legitimizing sexual relationships is becoming providing documentation that both parties consent to a sexual encounter. The state now enforces child support, whether a child’s parents have ever been married or not.

When a county government issues a marriage license, it takes on the responsibility of adjudicating division of property and pensions when the marriage ends in divorce a few years later. More of us now circumvent the dating-to-divorce pipeline.

Marriage can remain a religious ritual or sacrament for those who wish to participate, but county and state governments do not need to keep track of who marries and who divorces. We will still need the courts to administer division of property and pensions when a couple decides to go their separate ways, but the courts can handle such problems as contract disputes.

Removing the certification of marriages and the performance of weddings from the job descriptions of public officials would be an important step in the separation of church and state. The churches should welcome such separation. The greater degree of separation, the less the government will interfere with religion.