Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
-10-
Emotion and Love, AI Style
If you fall in love with a machine there is something wrong with your
love-life.
—Lewis Mumford [1]
If someone said that falling in love with a Jew, a Black, a Catholic, a
Puerto-Rican, an Italian, or a member of any other minority group,
showed that there is something wrong with your love life, you would
quite justifiably regard him as a bigot. So why discriminate against ma-
chines? Can machines not have emotions and can they not induce emo-
tions in humans?
The very notion of robots having emotions will be greeted by many
people with scepticism, disbelief or derision. Surely emotions are some-
how sacrosanct. Should they be trifled with? Should they be created ar-
tificially, with all that that implies for robot love, sex and reproduction?
Are not love, sex and reproduction at the very core of being human, even
to the extent that they are immune to computerisation? Yes, they are at
the very core. No, they are not immune to computerisation.
An emotionless robot
1
would be a mere machine, so a logical step in
the development of humanoid robots is to endow them with emotions
and enable them to detect emotions in humans. Robots can then respond
to a person's emotions in ways that help the robot to interact as humans
do. Similarly, robots will be able to detect the emotions of other robots,
with the same result. Once the reader has accepted this notion it is only a
short mental step to the concept of humans feeling emotions for robots,
together with all that that implies, including fears such as “I think my
wife is having an affair with her hairdresser robot.”
1
Hitherto this topic has been precise in its use of the words “computer”, “software”, “hardware”
and “robot”. Chapters 10-13 discuss the robots of the future and their likely capabilities. Much of
the research examined in this part of the topic has been carried out on computers rather than robots,
and some of it has been software simulations of what would happen if the same technologies were to
be implemented in a robot. Since one of the main purposes of Part III of this topic is to look decades
into the future, when all of these technologies and many more
will
be implemented in robots, this
and the subsequent chapters no longer make any distinction between computer, hardware, software
and robots, but will instead use the word “robot” generically, to mean any and all of these.
