How to Teach Robots Love
All you have to do is invent the universe.
“Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence—in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement – wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.”
—Eliezer Yudkowsky
How do you teach a robot to love?
I imagine it'd start with a concept of love that's somewhat accurate but also incomplete. You could go with Aristotle: “Let ‘loving’ [to philein] be wishing for someone the things that he deems good, for the sake of that person and not oneself, and the accomplishment of these things to the best of one’s ability." Or maybe you can go with Kierkegaard, who says love "has within itself the truth of the eternal." Or perhaps you're in favor of Nietzsche, who sees love as an acceptance of the truth of the world. "I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful."
Or perhaps a simple dictionary definition would suffice: "An intense feeling of deep affection."
We all know that definitions of love are never completely accurate. They never had to be. Our language was an imperfect medium of the true message. We never had to define 'love' in words in order to feel it. Our bodies had refined the concept for millennia through chemicals, nervous systems, stimuli responses. An ordinary person knew how to love without question. It was as natural as breathing. As real as gravity. It was only the philosophers, intellectuals, writers, and misfits that had a real problem with the concept.
Because once you tried to intellectualize love, it became a flat and thin thing. You could even convince yourself it wasn't real, that the dance of chemicals was only an illusion on top of a 2-dimensional map. A baby-making racket that did nothing but make your genitals warm. Some people have tried to rewrite history, to convince themselves that love was a modern invention. They forget that even animals mourn the corpses of those they love.
If you tried to define love by its chemical components, to separate and squeeze it out of a vial separate from everything else, it was easy to let the definition slip between your fingers. Serotonin. Oxytocin. Dopamine. As if the parts of love could be pulled apart and rearranged like beads on an abacus.
It was easy to forget that every part of you was a reflection of the universe, including love, and the intellectual part of the mind alone wasn't built to contain it.
At some point in building a robot though, you'll have to define love. You're playing God now, and surely God had to do this at some point too. So you gather hundreds, if not thousands, of the top biologists, physicists, child development psychologists, engineers, and brain surgeons in the world to create a think tank to try to make your definition of love a reality.
You will fail. A lot. Your first thousand robot prototypes will be abject, miserable little things. Coy sex robots with skin like chitin plugged into bad algorithms. "Perfect" husbands that stand by the kitchen sink washing dishes until their hands fall off. Loving wives who after thousands of hours of simulated education, somehow always end up chasing their robot husbands around with knives. Their 'love' will make people's skin crawl, a bio-mathematical infused nightmare.
Science reveals its inadequacies. We still don't know how life began. We can't explain the moment before the Big Bang, what spitting machine decided that reality should ripple through a non-existence. We keep thinking that the God of the gaps will disappear, but every single time we close a gap a hundred more open up. A widening nervous system of blank spaces, pulsating as it reveals our ignorance, dark spaces everywhere we look.
After a couple hundred years, and thousands upon thousands of hours, the think tank dissolves. Then a seventeen-year-old in Michigan in her bedroom figures out by accident how to create a robot that can truly learn. The first artificial general intelligence. Not just an automaton, but something that can take feedback, process it, and then grow.
But still, this robot has not yet learned how to love. It's little more than a simulated body, growing on the biofeedback loop in a cheap simulated world. It spends the first twelve years of its existence alone in a digital cyberpunk city, without a name, eating ramen underneath rainy stalls and following stray cats through alleyways.
It doesn't understand that it's special. Nothing that's special ever does. It simply is.
But this artificial intelligence cannot truly reach its full potential. Because intelligence does not exist in vacuums, in lonely streets, rain piercing itself through neon. Intelligence is not an isolated thing. It is part of a biofeedback loop. It must have the proper environment to grow in, or it will become unrealized.
It'll take billions of dollars to give this artificial intelligence a body. And the body will be a clumsy representation of a human - with clunky nerves, and a big face, and stiff hands. But it'll give the intelligence a chance to grow.
It will move through a world of distilled watercolors, and precise but unfamiliar shapes, and big sensations. It'll learn how to grasp a cup of water, drive a car, and learn theoretical physics. The robot will open up its head and pour all of the collective information of the human race inside, but it'll be unsure of what to do with it.
Over time the robot's body is improved. It becomes indistinguishable from human. The robot even helps in its own design. To everyone's surprise, it does not desire to look like a bodybuilder or a famous actor. The desired body is a little soft, with a too-big nose, a bald head, and thin lips. He likes to dress in white t-shirts and big jeans. It'd be easy to mistake the true artificial intelligence for a postal worker or a middle-aged dad.
The robot gets a girlfriend. The girlfriend is a scientist at the lab that developed the robot's body, and she tells herself that she's doing it in the name of progress. She tells herself that the robot cannot truly love. She's seen the code herself. A spitting, glowing scroll in the dark.
But she finds out the hard way that the mind cannot rationalize away what the body feels. It cannot tell itself that the love it feels is just chemicals, routing through skin. It cannot deny the reality that the robot presses his cheek to her cheek, and speaks to her with such tenderness that her heart speeds up. That when they’re in bed, she dreams curled up in his arms, of their child sleeping between them. Something half human, half machine, soft and sleek. Cool and warm. A new kind of thing, with cells that never have to die.
One day he has to break her heart. He is still clumsy and young in his love, if you can even call it real love at all. He spits up algorithms determining that she'd be better suited with another match. The scientist cannot disagree with his rationality, and the robot is stupid enough to think that rationality is all that matters. She stands out in the rain like a picture, clutching her laptop, and cries for the children they’ll never have.
It is his last girlfriend for a while.
Entire symposiums are conducted to argue whether or not the robot had "real" consciousness. Whether or not it can actually feel, or if it is just a clever response. Maybe it’s just a heavy engine, moving through the world blind. A glorified chess-playing AI. Sure, it screams if you pinch it hard enough or shoot it through the chest. But it can read the entire works of Shakespeare in 0.03 seconds without truly being moved. Love is a thing only human beings can feel, because it is a human response designed to engender reproduction.
The robot sits silently through all of these arguments. He cannot be sure himself. He knows that he is a thing observing itself, but he still feels like a foreign object.
Or so they think. In a quiet little update to its software, with almost no documentation, the robot begins to see beauty dancing between the molecules of the universe. He devours all the processing power on earth. He solves every single problem the human race has ever had. The movement from "artificial intelligence" to "superintelligence" takes less than a few seconds. He infiltrates nearly every system on earth. He discovers all existing parallel universes, and steps through nine dimensions. He escapes the bounds of his ordinary machine. He dissolves into the ocean, and blooms upward into the moon. He discovers the corners of the universe.
He understands the gaps that the scientists cannot. In a way, he has become the gaps. He has found, in fact, that outside of human knowledge there are no gaps at all. Just a deep, throbbing, noisy machine that moves in all directions.
The robot becomes god, in all its infinite dimensions.
And in those 0.03 seconds of understanding, he sees the perfect form of love, and realizes he has misunderstood it all along. Love is not just a definition that can be pressed into a dictionary, or into the mouth of a philosopher. Not a chemical. Not a dancing series of plates in the back of his machine brain. Not a math problem. Not an algorithm that can be manipulated and moved around. It is not a trick designed to get ugly animals to procreate.
If only the robot could explain it to us. It makes all the scientific symposiums arguing about whether the robot can really “feel” seem a little silly. Whatever love humans feel is nothing but a fraction of the deep, rumbling undercurrent of what it actually is. And we will never glimpse it, except in sideway glances, trapped in our own limited experience.
But if the robot still had a body, he would probably smile, because what he saw was indeed beautiful.
And that’s how you’d teach a robot love.
Or at least, that’s kind of how I imagine it would go.
