Teaching Robots to Love

make this case today. I don't know, or we'll just muddle the whole concept of love. But I do think that we can't help but to to love our technology and be attached to it, and eventually that will become this idea that robots will be programmed to love us because we just love love. Well, that that sounds sweet. But I think you can stop love. I think love is a very stoppable force. I think it's a virus. Yeah,

it persists. The viruses are stoppable, some of them. So if we have the ability to to stop some forms of love in their tracks. Because the first thing we need to discuss is, of course, the nature of love. What is love? Because love is a is just a word like love is a big tent that encompasses a lot of things. I mean, because you know, obviously there's a loved one feels for one's wife, there's a loved

one feels for one's child. There's the love one feels for like a really good sandwich, And these are vastly different emotional states. Oh yeah, I think that Aristotle had a sandwich love category. Yeah. Yeah. You can kill a love for a sandwich if you just say, oh, well that actually that sandwich isn't very good for you, or those ingredients are really foul, or that restaurant got a

really crippling and a health rating. Uh, And then you might be, oh, well, maybe I don't love this sandwich is much, or you could over indulge in the sandwich. Whereas it's harder to kill the love safe for you know, for a spouse or a child or something. Just because someone says, well, that kid's hair is a little weird. You're not gonna be like, oh well, okay, love removed generally generally speaking, sometimes how bad the hair is. Yeah, um, did you know that what is love? Was the most

searched phrase on Google in two thousand and twelve. Really, people want to know, were they looking for that song? Isn't that what is love? Baby don't hurt? That song? That what keeps saying it baby don't hurt me? Mm hmm, that's all I know. Yeah, No, I don't think it was that song, but I'm glad that we got to get you. That might have been the searches. We're just

looking for those lyrics. It's possible, It's possible. But well, this, this idea that people are searching for the meaning of love had one Guardian article called what is Love talked to several different experts about their take on love, which was sort of interesting because again, here's this big, huge concept that has so many different meanings and so many different categories, and to the point where the word itself

tends to lose meaning. You know, like when someone says, oh, I love something, it almost is a pointless thing to say because it's such an overused word that it we've we've just stripped it of all its power. That is true. I was just thinking that with my daughter, I don't like her to say the word hate. I oftentimes will say, do you truly hate that? You know? Is it just that you dislike it? Because that's a word that's very strong. But I never say do you really love that? Are

you sure you love that? Because there's so much positivity associated with it. Uh. Theoretical physicist and science writer Jim Al Khalil had said that while lust is a temporary, passionate sexual desire involving the increased release of chemicals like testosterone and estrogen, he says that in true love or attachment, in bonding, the brain can release a whole set of

chemicals pheromones, dopamine, nor epinephrin, UH, serotonin, oxytocin, embasso, pressant. So, he says, from an evolutionary perspective, love can be viewed as a survival tool, a mechanism that we evolve to promote long term relationships, mutual defense and parental support of children, and to promote feelings of safe safety insecurity. Yeah. So it's basically a chemical bond to things that enable us to better perform our genetic mission as organisms. There are

several different versions of love. They're laid out in this this particular article. For instance, there's philia, the deep non sexual intimacy between close friends or family members or soldiers in the trench. You know, it's uh, it's this this bond of love that's you know, not sexual, not romantic, but it's it's you know, it's your your your bros kind of you know kind of love, bras bras bra love. I guess, Okay, Yeah, then there's a there's a lotus

playful affection that found in fooling around or flirting. Now this one is I guess a little harder to like nail that. I mean, I guess I can think of some past example to that, you know, where you're kind of like flirty with somebody, but you're not really going after them per se. You know that it doesn't seem to be much to that one, right, because that's such an ephemeral stage. Yeah, it's kind of like like that one's just like I mean, that one can be killed

by the sobering up a bit. I think, you know, like that's not it's barely love. It seems a little cheap to even classify it as a form of love, doesn't it. Yeah, then there's a pragma, the mature love that develops over a long period of time between long

term couples. Uh. And this and this is really you know, when people talk about all that deep love that grows out of relationship because the relationship maybe may begin with lust or even this lootus thing we're talking about, or it may be begin with philia, but over time it develops into this strong bond, this bond where it's it's built over time and in a way that it just can't be uh, you know, pulled off a shelf, and it involves just a lot of goodwill towards another person.

It's like wanting the best for someone regardless of the cost. So you might not have a huge surge in dopamine or vasopressin um or even oxytocin, but it's there. It's still you know, from from a chemical level, is still sort of running behind the scenes. Uh. Then there's a cape the more generalized love that I remember hearing a lot about in church. That's kind of like this sort of universal love love everybody, love your neighbor, right, even

if it doesn't seem practical. Uh, it's just kind of an idealized, good natured, be cool of everyone, which you know, there is a good, good way to look at the world if you can, if you can do it, Yeah,

it's kind of the seventies love hug. Then there is self love or philapia, which is uh is maybe not as selfish as it sounds, to be clear, and not talking about self love in the sexual context either, no, no, no, no no no. Um and uh yeah, this just means uh, I mean you can break it down to the fact that if you're gonna care about others, you need to be able to care about yourself. And then there's of

course eros sexual passion and desire. Uh. And you know, and this is again when people talk about love at first sight in terms of a male female romantic relationship, this is often what they're actually talking about. I believe you know, they're they're talking about arrows. They're talking about lust and physical attraction, sexual attraction that may again eventually morph into some other form of love or just fall

off entirely. Yeah. That's what I feel it should be astrict like, it's not really a form of love unless it becomes philia or pragma, yeah, or some other type of love. It's more like a pre love secretion or something I don't know, depends that you want to secretion. Yeah, Because again we're talking a lot about about hormones flowing about about you know, your hormonal response to a potential may your hormonal response to um, you know, an infant,

a child, you know, some sort of offspring. There's there's a lot of secreting going on. There is a lot of secreting, and you can't really secrete all of those for just one person, right, all those different types of love. I mean, perhaps there's that one rare person in your life that can take on all those roles of love, but most likely your family, your friends, your community take

on all these different aspects of it. In this article, they also talk to a philosopher to talk about love as a passionate commitment, which really kind of flows in with the with the progment we were talking about. Yep, it says that we have to This is from Julian Baggini. The philosopher said that we need to nurture and develop it,

even though it usually arrives in our lives unbidden. So you take this idea of what love could be, and then you begin to think about how we love objects or things, and I started to think about this idea of apophenia. Now, apophenia is um this sort of unmotivated seeing of a connection and a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness. That we ascribed to an object, and this was defined

by German neurologists and psychologist Clause Conrad. So that means when you look at an inanimate object and you see what looks like a pair of eyes and a nose in the mouth, you're unconsciously try to make sense of the data in front of you, and you're describing it with something that is not what it actually is. Right, But it's our human context that we're bringing with us all the time, So we can't help to sort of

project those humanness feelings onto something. Yeah, and um, as you've brought up before, the we have this surprising ability to see faces like you really you don't have to put a smiley face even on something to give it this sense of person and give it, I mean we can.

We We glimpse faces in the clouds, we glimpse faces on the moon, and it's all just kind of this, uh, you know, this atavistic resonance where our pattern seeking brains are looking for things that affect us and what would affect us more than it's ap peering into the night and seeing the face of man or beast, you know, lurching there in the dark, that would be some vital information you need to know because friend or foe is

is right upon you. Yeah. Actually, Sonia Wynn Hager, she's an anthropologist at the University of Vienna, said in an interview with Life Science that this tendency would have likely protected our ants susters and she said taking a bear for a stone might be lethal, but the opposite does no harm. Yeah, you get down to that whole thing of that whole situation with type one and type two airs.

You know, one air means that, oh, you got me, You're not actually a bear trying to eat me, and the other air is, um, oh you're actually a bear and you just devoured me. So which one, obviously does evolution end up selected? Yeah, what's the error that you're

going to have? And so then you have this apophenia, this pattern recognition, seeing patterns everywhere, and you meld that together with anthropomorphism, and that's giving human characteristics to animals and inanimate objects, and you begin to see that as humans, we are going to maybe shovel off some of our emotions onto these objects. And I wanted to bring up this study that wind Hagger and her colleagues UH conducted this this tendency for us to actually personify cars. Now,

she conducted this this study, and auto never understood. You know, it happens all the time, especially in TV shows where someone's got a car and it's got this this lady's name night Rider. Well but that was what kit I think, yes, that that car actually talked and had personality and uh, and they loved each other. But it's that that's the fantasy of the relationship that some people want to have

with their cars. I guess it comes off kind of cree creepy though, sometimes because it's like talking about his car in his fancy car has like a lady's name, and it's like there's an implied relationship there. That's kind of weird. Do do do do do? Do? Do? Do? Do? Do do do? All right, So, I mean people do have relationship with her with their cars. My daughter loves our car and she kisses it. It's very odd. Does

it have a name though? Yeah? What Lightning the queen from the movie Cars, which probably has something to do with it. Right, Actually, the whole movie is that the animation is a great example of anthropomorphizing. Oh yeah, yeah, totally. Um alright, so whin Haggar's study in Austria that she reported in two thousand and eight that people attribute human traits to vehicles based on factors such as the shape of the headlights and the size of the windshield because

as you've got the mouth there with the grill. She then took the study to rural Ethiopia where there would be less of a context right for for some of the ways that we operate in terms of car commercials and all all that sorts of stuff, And she found out that the eighty nine Ethiopians who compared forty nine renderings of cars along with nineteen different human traits including gender, also saw the cars in a very human way, and cars with slit like wide set headlights were judged as male,

adult and dominant by both Austrians and Ethiopians, as were cars with smaller windshields and wider faces and smaller eyes and foreheads. Again, the foreheads equivalent to the car windshield were considered to be more masculine features and human faces. So they down that the cars that were considered childlike we're also considered more feminine, and this included closer set headlights and larger windshields. So interesting to see these two

different cultures both ascribing human qualities to this. So yeah, there's there's all sorts of weird emotional landscape here wrapped up and and de humanization and anthropomorphism, and those are really that's the same movement in different directions. I am either adding personhood to something that is not a person, or am I taking personhood away from something that is uh is a person or a head to some degree

as a person. And then there's the whole person's head thing and yeah, which we all right, let's take a break and when we get back, we will talk about loving robots. All right, Hey, we're back. We're talking about anthromorphism, uh, persona vacation. We're taking objects and we're making them worthy of concern, protection, punishment, reward. Um we can as humans, we have this innate ability to personify anything. A pencil, a computer, a coffee table. We you know, we we

get mad at a computer that's misbehaving on us. We start the shouting at it, calling it names. Uh, I've stubbed my toe on a coffee table, and I treat the coffee table like it's an enemy, Like I want to attack it for attacking me. Many coffee tables are the enemy. Yeah, um yeah, And if you look at that car study, then you can easily extrapolate that that, you know, us us humans connecting with robots would just be a logical conclusion, right exactly. But yeah, but we're

getting into this stage where we are using robots. I mean already I have a robot vacuum cleaner in my house, you know, and uh and in their robot mont lawn mowers. We're looking at a future where robots will help care for our elderly. They're going to be in our hospitals, they're gonna be on our streets, and we're gonna be interacting with them all the time. So the same model applies. We We don't need to become more like robots to interact with the robots that care for us and and

and do all these tasks. We want the robots to at least meet us halfway well and meeting us halfway. I'm glad you brought that up because it reminded me of an episode that we did called Living with Robots, and which we talked about the Lyric Project. And in the Lyric Project, they had something called the Robot House. Not to be confused with Robot House from Futurama, which was a robot the fraternity, right, and this is not also a new reality show by the way, at least

not yet. It would be great, they should do it, but yeah, five weeks in the Robot House. Some some study participants took uh their place in this house and what they tried to figure out in this domestic setting is how annoyed with humans get when robots were programmed to sort of get in their space or not hand them something in the time that they expected the human

expected the robot to hand them something. Yeah. Well, one great example is when we came back from our break, we both spoke at the same time, and our typical responses, oh, I'm sorry, you go first, and you're like, oh no, no, you go first, but you finished. But did try to match you there for a bit. But with a robot. One of the examples that often pointed out like, say you and a robot reach for the same object at

the same time. Now, when humans do this, the typical response is going to be, oh, I'm sorry, you were reaching for that. You go ahead, you go ahead and have some of those snacks. I'll hold up. And then the other person will say no, no no, no, you do it now the robot. Is the robot gonna have any kind of programming that allows for that kind of consideration, or the robot simply gonna grab the snacks and then the human not realizing and you know, certainly the human

is anthromomorphizing. They're they're they're regarding this machine as some sort of a human entity to some degree. How are they going to react? They're gonna think, oh, well, that's stinchy robot trying to get these snacks before I can have some. That's totally rude. So how do you You have to start thinking of ways to program the robot to behave in a human capacity and even these small

little interactions just to avoid sort of subliminal hostility blossoming up. Yeah, because what they found in this study is that people did start to think that the robots were doing things on purpose and and really starting to get angry with them. And this is not just a crazy one off experiment. That's really this This field of human robotics interaction, uh, is something that's only like a decade old. But the reason is there is because it is forthcoming, and you know, you do want some