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In Dutch, we have this - kind of newish? - word: huidhonger. The literal translation of this word is skin hunger, but this sounds a little bit weird in my opinion, so I would rather call it touch deprivation (= aanrakingstekort, for the Dutchies among us). This word really surfaced in the course of 2020, when the whole Corona epidemic started. With huidhonger, we refer to the desire, or shortcoming of physical touch. This is not necessarily sexual, it also concerns a hug with a family member or a friendly embrace. Because of all the social distancing measurements that came with the Corona epidemic, we can not have as much physical contact with each other as usually. With that comes the fact that a lot of people are actually getting depressed or even sick, due to the lack of physical, human, touch: they experience huidhonger.
This new, recent, awareness of this phenomenon really caught my attention, especially as it seems to be a purely human quality. When I attempted to find examples of artificial creatures, or robots, that try to imitate this need for touch, I could not find any. Most examples that I found, where either about robots that were given the sense of "touch", or about how humans felt when touching a robot. But no robots that experienced - or at least pretended to experience - huidhonger when they did not experience physical touch for a significant amount of time.
I would want to create an artificial creature that would pretend to experience this phenomenon of huidhonger. It would be either a physical bot or a digital one, but either way, a human person would have to "touch" it (in the form of holding its' hand, hugging or just placing a hand on it) and if the creature does not receive any form of human touch, it would get depressed and screams for it. It would also be interesting to see how human beings would interact with and react to this create: will they give in and touch it, to save the creature from experiencing huidhonger, or will they not feel sorry for it, as it is just a machine?
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