Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
Robots and Love
Let us further consider the notion that people can fall in love with a ro-
bot. In the past, before the Internet was invented, many people had pen
friends with whom they exchanged letters. Through this type of cor-
respondence some people developed long-term friendships, occasionally
falling in love with their pen friend and agreeing to marriage even with-
out having met them. Moderately unusual, yes, but only moderately. It
is easy to understand how two people can fall in love on the basis of their
communications with each other, even without physical contact. Much
of the emotional basis for love is based on your feelings about your part-
ner's character, personality, interests, ideas, how he or she talks (or writes)
toyou,...somanythingsthatcanbecommunicatedverbally.Ofcourse
the fact that your partner is human is a very important factor, but in
future decades it will become less and less so.
In Chapter 7, in the discussion on Natural Language Processing, we
saw how easy it is for someone to be fooled into thinking that a com-
puter program is actually human. The example of ELIZA is perhaps
the earliest and certainly one of the most amusing cases from the past.
And nowadays it is possible for chatterbots, such as those taking part in
the annual Loebner Prize competition, to fool some of the competition's
judges for
some
of the time. How long can it be before the most sophisti-
cated conversational robots are able to fool some of the judges for
all
of
the time? I foresee a steady increase in the percentage of the human pop-
ulation that will not be able to distinguish whether their conversational
partner is human or silicon. The important question here, surely, is not
how long it will be before the percentage of people fooled all of the time
reaches 100 percent, but when this figure will reach a significant level.
When that day comes there will be hundreds of millions of people in the
world, not only those who are emotionally needy, who will be at least as
content talking to a robot as they will to another human being.
Given that falling in love and agreeing to marry can both happen
remotely, as is the case with pen friends and, in recent years, with friend-
ships started via chat on the Internet, the advent of software that can pass
the Turing Test with at least a significant percentage of the human pop-
ulation, surely means that significant numbers of people will fall in love
with artificial partners they meet on the Internet, i.e., robots. Of course
many people will find the idea distasteful at first, just as many people
have found the idea of same-sex love and marriage distasteful, but times
