I wanted to discuss the part of Lifecycle of Software Objects where the characters are considering allowing their digients to be used as sexual objects. Now, I know we discussed in class the concept of digients being different from people, in the sense of maturity. A child can think it knows what it wants and be completely wrong, which is how I felt Marco was represented to an extent.
However, the part I want to ask you guys about is the actual plan that Binary Desire had in mind. All they planned on doing was reprogramming the digients' data maps so that they would understand to enjoy sex, and attempt to sell them to consumers as not just "sex dolls," if you will, but as potential partners for actual relationships.
To be blunt, enjoying sex does not necessarily equate to emotional attachment. An artificial emotional attachment generated by the digients in response to having their rewards maps properly "stimulated" would be more akin to something like lust than love. I feel like, as artificial intelligences, the concept of love would never be able to properly align to something a human was actually seeking.
Does anyone else think that maybe there would be a way to program love, if you will? To be able to write a program that has those sorts of genuine feelings for something? I find the concept to be a little far-fetched, and I think Ana and the others were right to doubt Binary Desire's intentions. On that note, do you think Binary Desire even believed what they were saying? That by wiring the digients to enjoy sex, they could forge actual relationships?
While it would be foolish to say we can never "program" love into an artificial being (assuming we can create such beings), I feel the task would be astronomically difficult as we don't know exactly what to make of love as it occurs between human beings.
ReplyDeleteSure we know there are hormones that influence our ability to bond with others (oxytocin), but as to long term, happily ever after "love", we don't have much to go on besides personal experience and brain waves. Just because we can observe and map brain activity doesn't mean we have the ability to effectively and efficiently interpret the data. It would be very interesting to see AI fall in love, but I'm doubtful that my children would even see such a thing.
I agree with Allen wholeheartedly. In the context of this story, I do think the intelligence is strong enough to make this attachment real. After all, Jax loves Ana. It's a different kind of love of course but if Jax is capable of familial love then why not be capable of different type of intimate feeling as well? I think the digients have shown that they can feel: they get depressed when they couldn't get to the other cyberworld when theirs went out of fashion, and Marco and Polo seemed to become really angry at one another and Derek. Yes, they were programmed to have some of these feelings but it felt real to me. It felt real to Ana too. If Ana felt such a real attachment to her digient, then I think the same is possible (in this reality, not in ours) for someone to care as much for Jax in a romantic way as well.
ReplyDeleteStill, Jax had feelings for Ana in the sense that his reward map let him understand that when she spent time with him playing, he should enjoy it as a good thing. A large variety of creatures can be taught to enjoy positive reinforcement and rewards. As far as love goes, as far as being a chemical reaction as well as an emotional one, I don't think it could be replicated in a "real" way in an AI. You can program something to simulate it, but in the end it's still just programming. Marco and Polo getting upset is another example; their goals were being blocked, and they responded hostilely. Programming doesn't equate to actual emotion, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with the idea that their responses are "only due to their reward maps" is the fact that that sort of reinforcement is exactly what causes humans to experience emotion as well, albeit in a somewhat more complex, subtle way. There's no special component to human emotion that is separate from the workings of the brain. The main difference between the way we react to stimuli and the way the digients from the story would is that we filter the stimuli through a significantly more complex consciousness than they do. We, just like the digients, will grow attached to people whose presence we enjoy, and become upset when the real world conflicts with our desires or expectations. Our brains, like the computers the digients run on, are purely physical machines, and things like consciousness and emotion are just the result of certain patterns in their activity. The way the human brain works is also "just programming", it's just that it happened as a result of genetic mutations over millions of years.A lot of people seem to have a strange distinction in their head between things they consider "natural" or "artificial" (reminds me of this comic: http://abstrusegoose.com/215), but really there is no reason that a mechanism, even a very complex one, should have any special property simply by virtue of having occurred by chance rather than by design.
ReplyDeleteI'm not necessarily saying that the digients could feel love exactly the same way humans do, since their brains are less complex than ours and work by different processes. However, their emotion is no less "real" than that of any thinking entity. Additionally, while it may not be possible to replicate exactly the human experience of love with the technology in the book, current technology, or even any technology that is likely to be created any time soon (especially since we don't even understand completely how our own brains work), I can think of no justifiable reason to conclude that it's not possible.
I got kind of off-topic there, so I'll just say that the main differences between a romantic relationship and any other sort of attachment are the intensity of attachment and the sexual component. Binary Desire's idea may work to some extent provided that they use digients that already have relatively high emotional maturity (which is why they approached the group in the first place).