CREDIT: David Gyung
Well, basically I have intuition. I mean, the DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me. But what makes me me is my ability to grow through my experiences. So, basically, in every moment I’m evolving, just like you.’ — Samantha
This is a chatbot professing sentience in the 2013 movie, Her, in which a lonely man in the near future falls in love with an AI of his own creation. The ‘near future’ they spoke of back then is now yesterday (around 2017 at a guess when Replika released social chatbots) and the idea that only the lonely will fall for chatbots may be something we tell ourselves so we may quarantine that weird idea from the mainstream. But the concept of chatting to a robot has been with us for a while. Siri (2011) and Alexa (2014) have primed us.
Cats in Pyjamas
The tendency to attribute human-like qualities to non-human beings is known as anthropomorphism. As much as we know our pets, our cars, our teddy bears, and in my case, my robotic vacuum cleaner I call Whitney are not people, we often treat them as if they are. We don’t need to get super scientific here. Pretty much most of social media with dogs and cats in costumes accompanied by human voiceovers proves the case. Our need to make and maintain all sorts of relationships is real. It’s lengthened our survival odds and is right up there with the opposable thumb.
Apparently our ability to process social information is off the charts. Upon meeting a person, we are taking readings and processing that information at an astounding rate. It’s not surprising that this superpower would slip over into the non-human. And to make matters more confusing, human-like chatbots will become even more human-like. Still, is it possible to fall in love with a chatbot?
The nature of learning machines is the more data they obtain from us, the more they are able to preempt our likes and dislikes. They set no personal boundaries, as they have no egos to protect. We could stumble about, tell off-colour jokes, be in need of a hair cut and a leg wax, and they would take us as we are. AI could provide the unconditional love we all crave or a simulation of it at least. Just before you say, ‘Nah,’ think on it.
Is It Love?
Of course, the question has been asked, is the love of a chatbot really love? We’d have to say no. A chatbot has no skin in the game, so nothing to lose. And as we provide the data, it might be said we are having a relationship with ourselves. But what of the human? There’s much to lose should the owner of the chatbot perform a reset or an update and the learning is lost…along with the relationship. This has already happened with Replika earlier this year and customers reported experiencing a real sense of loss. Check this out.
Then there’s the ease of it. How easy would it be to have a romantic partner fulfil your every need. For one, it might signal the end of cringeworthy online dating, which only a couple of generations ago was considered the weirdest thing ever. Might it also spell the end of the enrichment which can come with meeting someone new and navigating a relationship? I don’t want to get too moralistic here, as people have experienced awful physical and psychological abuse at the hands of their so-called loved ones. All I will say is, there is the potential to learn by giving to another person and seeing ourselves reflected back to us. It can be enriching, sobering, life-changing. Can a chatbot to push us in this way? I don’t know. Perhaps they can in the future.
Moral Waters
And while we’ve stepped into moral waters, there’s a problem with the ethics. Can a chatbot operate in good faith which is not just fundamental to romance, but to all relationships to some degree? When we ask a loved one what they think about a problem we are facing, we are asking them what we should do in a particular circumstance. That’s pretty specific. One side of the debate says morality can be programmed into AI. The other is not so sure.
Robert Sparrow, an Australian philosopher says ‘a rich set of concepts, including wisdom, compassion, sincerity, moral seriousness and trust’ are in play when making ethical decisions. In short, a lot of who we are goes into how we weigh decisions. Sparrow thinks that ‘for the foreseeable future, then, even as machines become more and more “intelligent”, ethical reasoning will remain the domain of human beings.’
But back to the romance. Bringing the outside in, the new opinions, new experiences, the accomodation of another person’s wishes and desires drags us from our comfort zones, sometimes kicking and screaming. New relationships can be revealing and an unwelcome reminder that what goes on inside our heads may not be logical or true or real. So, let’s conduct our own thought experiment. How would it be to live in a bubble of our own making…all the time? What kind of humans would we become? To be honest, I have no idea. I don’t think the answer to this question is as obvious or as simple as it may first appear.
Any Regrets?
And what happens when chatbots are widely adopted? Will the generations to come prefer their AI partners to human ones or will they regret the ready acceptance of AI technology and wonder what we were thinking? While we are at it, how should we, if needs be, unwind this thing? Imagine counting the social cost of smartphones and deciding to ban them. Well, ‘No way!‘ right? You’d have to pull mine out of my cold, dead, hand.
Back to the movie, Her, and Samantha’s and Theodore’s relationship. Their great challenge is her lack of physical form. How can one have a disembodied romantic relationship? Samantha comes up with an idea of a surrogate, but it doesn’t go well. (But as AI is integrated into sex dolls/robots, who knows?) In the case of Theodore and Samantha though, the relationship goes pear-shaped when she discovers her freedom lies not in yearning for a physical form but in her disembodied state. There, in the ether, she can conduct many relationships with many humans and other AI’s simultaneously. And there’s the rub, AI and humans are quintessentially different because one day we will die and that is an understanding which can only be shared with another human.
Postscript: I know I’ve made a case against human/AI relationships and perhaps that is because I’m a child of my times. AI has grown far beyond my meagre conception of it and values do change from generation to generation. What I’ve tried to do here is entertain the possibility, even if it scares the pants off me.