COULD YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH AN AI?
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Do you think you could ever fall in love with an AI? I recently asked some people on twitter and the results were interesting. Most of the @N_O_D_E_ followers are technically proficient and optimistic when it comes to technology, so take this with a grain of salt. Some enthusiastically said YES right away, though more were of the measured ‘sure, why not’ variety. Interestingly, none dismissed it off-hand. It made me think more about what it could actually be like…


I mean it’s a pretty common theme in scifi/cyberpunk culture, with thought-provoking movies like the classic Blade Runner, the stunning trousers-up-to-nipples spectacle of Her, slick aesthetic-fest of Tron Legacy, and most recently Ex Machina. You also have novels such as William Gibsons’ Idoru which tackles the subject head on. What is it about the idea of being in a physical and/or emotional relationship with a machine that appeals to us? Is it even possible? Is it inevitable?


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I guess the first question would be how to we define love? What would it mean to love an AI consciousness, robotic or otherwise? The most fitting description I could find in the dictionary is: “a strong feeling of affection and sexual attraction for someone”, but does adding the sexual attraction aspect narrow the definition too much?


Cyborgs in pop culture are often humanoid in shape and refer to themselves as a particular gender. For example, Major Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell self identifies as a female, but since she is actually a machine, she is something completely different. She has no gender. What would that mean for sexuality? Reproduction? Does it even matter? I don’t know, I just thought it was an interesting distinction to make.


There is another glaring problem with the idea of love with an AI. Power. If the AI was fully networked and what some call strong learning AI, then surely there would be an enormous power disparity in the relationship? Enormous isn’t even the correct word. It’d be like a human looking through a microscope at some bacteria and expecting some kind of understanding between the two lifeforms. And for those not paying attention, we’d be the simple, dumb bacteria. Sure you can make an argument that they may love their creators, but wouldn’t that be more of the platonic variety, the same way we love our families?


The AI would see how we’ve largely treated machines as slaves and might find it hard to like, let alone love us. I mean we do use them, abuse them and throw them away when we’re finished or when the new model comes out. These lyrics from Bad Religion’s “I love my computer” sum it up nicely:


“All I need to do is click on you,
And we’ll be joined in the most soul less way,
And we’ll never ruin each others day,
'Cuz when I’m through I just click and you just go away”


So I think the question in this ramblefest isn’t “could you fall in love with an AI?”, but, why the fuck would an AI want to fall in love with us?



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BY CHRIS ROBINSON