Sex And Love In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence

As we advance in the field of fuzzy logic and pattern recognition this date is getting even closer, and so it is valid to wonder what the day will be like when humanity is seriously confronted with the idea of falling in love and having relationships with an android or intelligent robot.

Can software feel love?

The question is not whether humans can feel love for a piece of software. The most likely answer is yes, and the better it is designed to captivate and seduce us, the more likely it is to make us fall in love.

The real question is: in what way would machines love?

We can think of love as a fairly understood and easily programmable temporal fixation.

Interestingly, the more personality and complexity we add to our artificial intelligence prototypes, the harder it would become to tell if they really have romantic feelings: they are more likely to feel something akin to attachment and describe identifiable sensations as love.

But how do we know if a machine is really in love and not just pretending to be?

'Need' is the key word. Humans, like all living things, seek to preserve the species as a way of coping with the depressing mortality of our fragile bodies, and to do so we reproduce.

As evolution took its course, those individuals who developed characteristics that helped them reproduce were able to give one more generation of life to their genetic material.

Pleasure in sex is one of the characteristics that emerged during that process, and the bond we know as love seeks to increase the likelihood that couples will stay together, at least until the offspring grow old enough to travel the world unaided.

We have no idea whether machines would fall in love.

And if necessity could trigger all these amazing behaviors in humans, what could an artificial intelligence need? What lack could trigger love-like behavior in machines? The quick answer: we have no idea.

Several current experiments seek to create conversational interfaces that can talk to users fluently, using at their disposal the data found in some specific databases; but what will happen when these interfaces have real-time access to the terabytes per second that we humans generate? What will they ask us? What conclusions will they reach? This is a much longer discussion and strays a bit from this topic.

It's time for sex

Sex solely for pleasure is a bit simpler. Those who have seen the movie 'Ex Machina' will not be surprised that you can have sex with an android that is sufficiently well made.

This is not difficult for the human involved, and the idea of an intelligent machine seeking to satisfy its curiosity about the world, including about its sexual capacity, is not so strange.

To some extent, software and we are not so different: we are both a set of mechanisms that have been selected and proven successful in accomplishing our goals.

The only thing that really changes is the level of complexity and the implications of our 'programming'. As I mentioned, sexual pleasure is born out of necessity.

The interesting thing here is that humans - and other species - managed to exploit the system, and we realized that there was no need for reproduction to feel the pleasure associated with it.

To our regret, technology is not usually full of curves, or at least not the curves we like. Humans have an instinctive fixation with our own figure, and in most interpretations of sexual androids in science fiction the machine has an anthropomorphic appearance.

But, in reality, sexual pleasure robots-at least the current ones-are far less curvy and sexy than we think.

That hasn't stopped us from trying, but our results so far are actually kind of creepy.

This is due to the so-called 'uncanny valley': the hypothesis that the closer the robots - or computer animations - are to the human form, but not quite the same, the greater the rejection response from people interacting with the robots in question.

One of the explanations given for this rejection is that when something has only a few human traits, our brain highlights them and makes us empathize with the object in question (that's why we like cartoons).

But if it has too many, our brain will emphasize the differences and easily associate what we see with a sick person, or with a strange behavior that would never quite fit.

It should be clarified that the prototypes shown are not sexual androids and have only been created with the purpose of resembling a person as much as possible.

But surely there are already several manufacturers inspired by these precursors, who are creating versions ready to erotically satisfy their owners.

Now, programming these behaviors in a machine with intelligence is not such a clear path.

If we try to copy all our emotions and mechanisms we will simply achieve less sophisticated versions of a human consciousness, something that may be somewhat useless and that, because of the 'uncanny valley' syndrome, would only deepen our rejection reaction.

The real fun would be if, when artificial intelligence is a widely recognized reality, we allow it to develop its own forms of expression, form, love and sexuality. Even if the result is not what we expect.

Although, for now, we have only managed to develop a primitive and strange collection of virtual and mechanical experiences that do not replace human interaction at all, there are already a lot of stories in books and movies that tell how love between humans and robots ends.

It's usually all surrounded by an apocalyptic tone, and there's always in the air the notion that someday the machines will rebel against us and seek to remove us from the equation.

Indeed, some may consider the idea of falling in love with an 'artificial' consciousness to be somehow misguided, and a line we should not cross.

But as time progresses we ourselves define the boundaries of our humanity, and with whom we share it.

If we recently saw equal marriage legalized in the United States, the day may not be far off when we can marry and share our lives with a set of lines of code and some hardware.