Article: Should We Program Robots to Love?

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Love is a many splendored thing It’s the April rose that only grows in the early Spring Love is nature’s way of giving a reason to be living The golden crown that makes a man a king

-Song written by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster (1955)

Nothing occupies the songs, poems, and stories of the human experience with more passion than love. The search for it, love lost, and love found form a central drive and experience of what it means to be human. Psychologists, scientists, and artists have asked what love is—that deep feeling of intense affection. In trying to understand love, psychologists have broken love down into different stages of development. In 1986, RJ Sternberg, a professor of Psychology at Cornell University, published “A Triangular Theory of Love.” (psychnet.org) In his theory, Sternberg describes three components of love: intimacy, passion, and commitment. The degree to which each of these components a person experiences with another will determine the intensity of love they feel. All three appear necessary to experience deep love.

From a different perspective, neurologists have worked for decades to understand the biology and brain function that accompanies the feeling of love. For example, doctors Esch & Stefano published an article in Neuro Endocrinology Letters titled “The Neurobiology of Love.” In their publication, Esch & Stefano cite the complex role of brain chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin that work in brain functions such as pleasure, reward, trust, and belief. (pubmed.gov) Research into the interrelationship between different brain functions and love has helped to find some mechanisms of how we experience love.

Robotic research covers a wide variety of topics, from locomotion to human interaction. An active area of robotic research looks into the emotional interaction between people and robots, including the potential for people and robots to fall in love. The research called “Lovotics,” conducted by researchers in Singapore and Japan, seeks to balance the possibility of a person falling in love with a robot and programming a robot with the ability to fall in love with a person. In an article in the Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, the authors Samani & Saadatian describe their work to develop artificial intelligence that mimics the human brain systems and chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin to allow a robot to fall in love with a human. (academia.org) Using proximity, reciprocal affection, attraction as measured by touch, time spent together, and other parameters, the researchers have built models that imitate the process of falling in love.

Recently on October 3, 2022, Tesla Corporation introduced two humanoid robots called Optimus that the CEO promised would cost about $20,000 when commercially available in the next five years. Although not the first robot on the market, Optimus portends robot production on a massive scale, indicating a fundamental change in human-robot interaction. Part of that interaction may involve humans and robots falling in love. The question remains whether that is even a good idea. After all, when we program robots to love, we are only programming descriptors of that love actually is. While the human being is feeling everything associated with love, the robot is still a robot. It then becomes all too easy to lose the ability to be able to interact with other human beings, because human beings are more complicated. It becomes all too easy to stay with a robot because it will do as it's programmed to do, and there is no need to be challenged or to grow and learn as people. As we move further into this technology, we too need to remember to foster our interactions with fellow human beings.

Dr. Smith’s career in scientific and information research spans the areas of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, toxicology, and chemistry. He has published a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has worked over the past seventeen years developing advanced analytics, machine learning, and knowledge management tools to enable research and support high-level decision making. Tim completed his Ph.D. in Toxicology at Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington.

You can buy his book on Amazon in paperback and in kindle format here.