At the Museum of Sex in New York City, artificial-intelligence researcher David Levy projected a mock image on a screen of a smiling bride in a wedding dress holding hands with a short robot groom. "Why not marry a robot? Look at this happy couple," he said to a laughing crowd. When Levy was then asked whether anyone who would want to marry arobot was deceived, his face grew serious. "If the alternative is that you are lonely and sad and miserable, is it not better to find a robot that claims to love you and acts like it loves you?" Levy responded. "Does it really matter, if you"re a happier person?" In his 2007 book, Love and Sex with Robots, Levy contends that sex, love and even marriage between humans and robots are coming soon and, perhaps, are even desirable. "I know some people think the idea is totally peculiar," he says. "But I am totally convinced it"s inevitable." The 62-year-old London native has not reached this conclusion on a whim. Levy"s academic love affair with computing began in his last year of university, during the vacuum-tube era. That is when he broadened his horizons beyond his passion for chess. "Back then people wrote chess programs to simulate human thought processes," he recalls. He later became engrossed in writing programs to carry on intelligent conversations with people, and then he explored the way humans interact with computers, a topic for which he earned his doctorate last year from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Over the decades, Levy notes, interactions between humans and robots have become increasingly personal. Whereas robots initially found work, say, building cars in a factory, they have now moved into the home in the form of Roomba the robotic vacuum cleaner and digital pets such as Tamagotchis and the Sony Aibo. Science-fiction fans have witnessed plenty of action between humans and characters portraying artificial life-forms, such as with Data from the Star Trek franchise or the Cylons from the re-imagined Batttestar Galactica. And Levy is betting that a lot of people will fall in love with such devices. Programmers can tailor the machines to match a person"s interests or render them some what disagreeable to create a desirable level of friction in a relationship. "It"s not that people will fall in love with an algorithm but that people will fall in love with a convincing simulation of a human being, and convincing simulations can have a remarkable effect on people," he says.
单选题
In the opening paragraph, the snapshot at the Museum of Sex serves to_____.