Day Sixty Seven

Since the beginning of spring break, I've noticed this blog has become more personal and less about love in general, which isn't something I wanted. While I think it's important to write about myself, I also don't want to focus on that too much. It's been difficult though - because I'm spending the entire day with my family, I haven't had the time to research and stuff like I normally do.

The other day, I saw this headline while scrolling through my Facebook feed: "Robot Programmed to Fall in Love with a Girl Goes too Far." I figured today was a good day to share that article with you and give you a few of my own thoughts on it.

Because, as you can imagine, all of the images of "Robot loves girl" were NSFW,
here's a picture of Walle and Eve.

Researchers at Toshiba’s Akimu Robotic Research Institute were thrilled ten months ago when they successfully programmed Kenji, a third generation humanoid robot, to convincingly emulate certain human emotions. At the time, they even claimed that Kenji was capable of the robot equivalent of love. Now, however, they fear that his programming has taken an extreme turn for the worst. 

“Initially, we were thrilled to see a bit of our soul come alive in this so called ‘machine,’” said Dr. Akito Takahashi, the principal investigator on the project. “This was really the final step for us in one of the fundamentals of the singularity.” 

Kenji was part of an experiment involving several robots loaded with custom software designed to let them react emotionally to external stimuli. After some limited environmental conditioning, Kenji first demonstrated love by bonding with a a stuffed doll in his enclosure, which he would embrace for hours at a time. He would then make simple, but insistent, inquiries about the doll if it were out of sight. Researchers attributed this behavior to his programmed qualities of devotion and empathy and called the experiment a success.

What they didn’t count on were the effects of several months of self-iteration within the complex machine-learning code which gave Kenji his initial tenderness. As of last week, Kenji’s love for the doll, and indeed anybody he sets his ‘eyes’ on, is so intense that Dr. Takahashi and his team now fear to show him to outsiders.

The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly. The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji.

“Despite our initial enthusiasm, it has become clear that Kenji’s impulses and behavior are not entirely rational or genuine,” conceded Dr. Takahashi.

Ever since that incident, each time Kenji is re-activated, he instantaneously bonds with the first technician to meet his gaze and rushes to embrace them with his two 100kg hydraulic arms. It doesn’t help that Kenji uses only pre-recorded dog and cat noises to communicate and is able to vocalize his love through a 20 watt speaker in his chest.

Dr. Takahashi admits that they will more than likely have to decommission Kenji permanently, but he’s optimistic about one day succeeding where Kenji failed.

“This is only a minor setback. I have full faith that we will one day live side by side with, and eventually love and be loved by, robots,” he said.

Source

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Now, there are a lot of doubts as to the validity of the story, but I don't think that matters because you believed it, didn't you? There is nothing about this story that's so absurd that you'd call it a fake at first glance. Even if this particular story is a fake, the fact that it's believable based on the technology we have means that one day soon, a story like this could be very real.

As far as Kenji being "in love," to me it seems less like love and more like this:

which I guess kind of sums of what a lot of humans consider love, so fair enough I guess. If you're programing love into a machine though, Overly Attached Robot should not be the end goal, because that's just dangerous. The last thing the world needs is a bunch of jealous robot girlfriends/boyfriends with superhuman strength and durability.

The last quote is what gets me. "I have full faith that we will one day live side by side with, and eventually love and be loved by, robots." What?! I can think of a thousand possible ways this could backfire. Think of the crazy things humans do in the name of love (like murder their husband or husband's mistress). Then, think of the strength and intelligence a robot would have. Finally, think of all the times your smartphone glitches. Even if the robot was too advanced to glitch, the amount of money it would take to develop such a robot would be ridiculous. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have that money go into something more... practical... than robots who can love, like feeding starving children or ending sex trafficking.

In fact, unless you have some kind of weird robot fetish, why would you want a robot as your significant other? So you could program the "perfect" spouse? If that's the case, you are a sad, sad individual. Also, you're probably narcissistic to think that you deserve someone who's specifically what you want and nothing more. I don't think you can force love - if it's forced, it's not real. Through programming, you'd be forcing that robot to love you and it's quite possible you could never love it back. 

So, if any future robotics scientists are reading this and anyone ever asks you to work on a project to create loving robots, just say no.