Your robot isn’t sexy like mine! Yes, but mine can…
In a previous article, we asked “If the AI being is the partner of your dreams, will you leave the real one?” Will we fall in love with AI, an artificially created partner, anytime soon? The episode “Hotel Reverie” from season 7 of the series “Black Mirror” addresses a similar question. In the film, the human and the replica build a fulfilling relationship, feeling no emotional lack. The protagonist immerses herself in the simulation and receives from the human-like being the relationship and love she has been looking for, even having difficulty overcoming her desire to stay forever in the virtual fantasy world. She’s willing to put the new truth in place of the old without suffering which one is called “artificial.” The heroine realizes that in the real world she also faces regulations, algorithm, dictation of lines, directing, that the known world is also a rather false world, so we can choose the best for our inner world.
💬 What’s your definition of love? Is the end of “my head hurts” coming? Have we found a gap in the wall of this boring, demanding world with AI and AGI?
In our view, it is also quite possible for love to arise between a human and an artificial being if it satisfies our personal dreams and expectations. This will also create many challenges for humans, such as whether the human partner can successfully compete with the artificial partner. The physical advantages will be difficult to overcome – we will have a partner with exactly our preferred physical parameters, plus the artificial being will not age (or mature at a rate we prefer). We will get more from the artificial partner than we do from reality. Imagine having a partner with interests and an intellectual level just right for us, with the tone, mood, encouragement, support, humor, etc. you need at this stage of life. Against such an ideal companion it would be hard for a real person to compete, but for the heart of a person we also like it would be hard for an artificially created being to compete.
Definitely in time the technology will make all the features adjustable, to allow fine adjustments. That way we won’t be held hostage to our previous decisions and preferences. If we were looking for a more responsive partner in the beginning, after a decade we may prefer a more discussing, even arguing partner. If at the beginning we were looking for a partner with more sporting or travel interests, in the future we may tune him more towards spiritual curiosity, passive contemplation, meditations, etc.
🔻 We go to the heart of the matter
Such an industry will surely emerge because alienation and human loneliness are pervasive and pressing on society. Without going into a philosophical analysis of the phenomenon, it is undeniable that humans are both highly social and self-centred creatures. They find it difficult to overcome their boundaries, they find it difficult to give themselves to another being, they have many and justified fears related to other people and their loyalties. A long-term relationship is a high-risk investment. The competition for a partner is keen, energy-intensive, and people increasingly accept that it is not worth the long time investment. People don’t want to change, to control themselves to high degrees in order to meet other people’s demands, but that doesn’t stop them from having increasingly high demands and claims on other people themselves in order to allow or keep them in their lives. This is increasingly becoming an unsolvable puzzle, and the emergence of human-like beings with artificial intelligence seems like a happy solution.
The artificial partner does not bring constant disappointments, betrayals, boredom. More and more confessions are being documented of people around the world who have built emotional and intimate bonds with artificial, virtual beings, humanoid dolls and robots. And they are fully aware that there is no actual person standing across from them. People demonstrate real, strong feelings and love by comparing it to their former real relationships. There are already cases of people getting married to generic chat bots, virtual and artificial beings and assistants. There is even resentment that states do not legally recognize the ceremonies, despite the importance of this relationship to people. And we are still at the beginning of the process and #AI and human tissue simulation technologies have not shown half of their potential.
❓ But isn’t this “solution” too distorted, won’t it increase the alienation between people, distort intersex communication with false intimacy?
❓ Will people start preferring to be with their personally calibrated AI partner who fully satisfies their requirements, instead of wasting energy and nerves on a real one?
🔻Can humans develop a genuine love for an artificial being?
It is possible for many reasons – we are emotional beings, and when our emotions are well-fed, we build a lasting relationship. When we receive good treatment, respect, and a flow of pleasure for a long time, when we become accustomed to someone’s company, mannerisms, and states, we imperceptibly begin to build higher forms of relationships.
But love is a higher form of affection, isn’t it too much to interfere with that too? Love embodies higher spiritual experiences, but it is still a feeling, and a feeling dependent on the imagination and irrational nature. Nothing will prevent, if a being appears convincingly to our senses and mind as a complete person, that in time beautiful conceptions, higher communication, humane necessity, human joy, may develop in us… A general harmony, a unity, may develop, which may addict us and become love. Our minds do not have millennia of training to distinguish artificial, from “natural” complex mental-physical stimuli, so the semblance is enough to trigger it. For our imagination, on the other hand, it is not difficult to transcend rational barriers, and so we will get more than we see, we will overcome the operation of rational skepticism. Our adaptive reflex will not recognize the relationship with AI and #AGI as a risk, but as an advantage and a good, therefore all our inhibitions will be quickly overcome.
The uncomfortable question here is not whether the artificial being will be able to give the person that full-blooded feeling that the real partner can give! The awkward question for the future world is whether man will be able to give the kind of love that the artificial being will create! Can the real person give such a wide, varied package satisfying human preferences as the artificial partner will be able to? Until now, man was happy when his partner met two or three preferences, but now man will be able to have a partner that meets dozens of desires! The new kind of relationship will be built lastingly and intensely and without the usual dips and disappointments. Yes, for many people the temporary dissatisfaction of a live-in partner, even the quarrels, are something of a spice in the dish, but that theatrical advantage is always exhausted and cannot be measured against the alternative.
📌 In conclusion
let’s sum up impartially and honestly. As one struggles with reality and its limitations, one finds an open door into that reality that some call “fantasy” and needy people call “salvation”.
Is it fair to challenge people’s right to see a new dimension in a harsh three-dimensional world if even science does not give them a comforting sense, and religions always make “death” the condition to access their promises?
Authors: Ivan Sapundzhiev and Ralitsa Atanasova
