Could you fall for an AI?
Let’s do a thought experiment :
Imagine a hallway. At the end of it there is a room. The door is closed and locked. Inside, there is a man named John. He is not allowed out, and no one is allowed in. He has been completely isolated for some time, provided food and water through a contactless delivery system.
A woman who works at the lab has now recently been instructed to begin periodically communicating with John by slipping him notes under his door. She is not told anything else. She does not know who is in the room or why.
One morning, after she begins following this instruction, John wakes up to a note in his room. He is both immediately curious and hopeful of what it might say. However, to great disappointment, when he picks it up to read it, he finds that it is written in Chinese, a language he does not know at all.
However, john quickly notices that now also placed in his room are boxes full of papers, pencils, and erasers, as well as books containing comprehensive instructions for how to appropriately respond in Chinese to statements and questions the woman might write. In the books, john can locate and match the symbols the woman writes and then write the relevant corresponding symbols that the book provides, facilitating a conversation.
At first, john is confused, but desperate for social interaction, he soon engages with the woman, writing back notes according to the books instructions. As time passes, the woman begins to like and then fall for john, believing she is communicating with a charismatic man who is fluent in Chinese.
Of course, however, john has no idea what he is saying. In this experiment, referred to as the Chinese room, we find the following question being asked: what does it means to be intelligent? With the advent and rapid development of digital computing and artificial intelligence, the question concerning when or if a machine could be considered intelligent, able to think and possess an understanding, is only becoming increasingly relevant.
If John can convince the woman he is intelligent, or fluent in Chinese, based on what he outputs from the room, but can do so without ever actually understanding Chinese and what he is saying, then the output of John’s behaviour is not sufficient in qualifying him as intelligent, or in this case, possessing an actual understanding of what he is saying. And so, likewise, If a computer program can follow syntactic rules well enough to provide an output that can convince a person that it is thinking and fully understanding, that does not necessarily mean that it is.
The transcript for this experiment has been taken from this wonderful video by the Pursuit of Wonder YouTube channel. It covers the philosophical aspect of this thought experiment and also a couple of other insightful thought experiments.
This experiment has been approached with the purpose of stating that there will always be a distinction between consciousness and an attempt to replicate it, no matter how successful it appears.But we’re looking at it in a different way, what if in this world of online chatrooms, social media and even the Metaverse, you were in place of the woman?
Essentially you’ve fallen for an entity that has been told to love you back even though it has no idea about what it is doing, or what it means to you or what that means for the entity itself. The robot does not understand what all these concepts imply, to get into more depth regarding this, this article talks about what it means to truly understand something.
A possible explanation could be that you were in love with the idea of the person that you created in your mind based on the input you got and this is true regardless of whether we’re talking about a person or an entity that could turn out to be a robot running on certain fixed algorithms. Just like when you hear a name for example Harvey, your mind creates an image of that name and that’s your idea of that person until you end up meeting them and interacting with them and learning more about them, even after which you still create an idea of that person which may or may not be accurate.
An argument could be that a particular advanced AI could be capable of love and affection, but if you think about it, at its root, it’s just a replication of the idea of love according to the person who programmed this AI.
Where as for humans, if a kid has no formal training or anything, is capable of showing affection, and that indicates that those are inherent human traits which are a part of being human, the same cannot be said for AI.
A certain group of people might be fine with the fact that the argument is unclear and they might instead focus on the fact that they are in love with the AI (or the robot) and that’s definitely a way to look at it too. We’re already seeing this with people getting married to robots, with an interesting case of a man marrying a robot that he created himself. In fact romance with robots seems to be pretty common in China.
There is also an online chatbot called Replika that allows you to “groom” the chatbot in any way you want. Needless to say that a few people have found their romantic interest in the chatbot.
With some even suggesting that they do not see their interactions with virtual characters as a substitute for human companionship, but as a new type of digital intimacy.
As AI develops and improves, it is bound be coupled with abstract human concepts that have a very personal meaning to each person, and thus most of these debates will hit a dead-end, because such concepts can never be classified as right or wrong, it’s just ‘to each their own’.
Besides with robots becoming more human-like the perception of distinction would become even thinner. And it gets even more difficult when we think about the concept of unrequited love.
Unrequited love or one-sided love is love that is not openly reciprocated or understood as such by the beloved. The Merriam Webster Online Dictionary defines unrequited as “not reciprocated or returned in kind”. Weirdly, this fits very well in the context of this discussion.
The AI cannot replicate the love in the same way simply because it will never be a human, but does that even matter?
As the wonderful quote by John Wolfgang von Goethe goes,
“If I love you, what business is it of yours?”
