Koi wa Mystery….

I think the best part of Love Machine was how it broached many different perspectives and views on Robotic love. It wasn’t just a philosophy documentary or a psychological one, but it contained perspectives from the highly educated PH.D to the regular church man. It was pretty comprehensive in scope so that made the whole thing more interesting. Alot of the stuff the documentary talked about dealt with modern technology so it would have been nice if it also included some stuff about robotic/mechanical love from older time periods. Although I don’t think people in the past have the opportunity to fall in love with machines as today’s robots are more lifelike than ever before, but perhaps there could have been some analogies in prior centuries. Hey you never know, Neanderthals could have totally fallen in love with fire and their stone spears. Who knows?

In my opinion the most compelling part of the film was when they discussed the problem of other minds in robots. We don’t have a test to make sure robots are conscious beings. We have to just take their word for it. I’m not sure if we’ll ever know whether or not the machines we create have a mind of their own.

As for robots falling in love or humans falling in love with robots I think humans can fall in love with robots. As Dennett said, we fall in love with stupid things. There are people who would marry their cat if given the opportunity. If robots keep the trend of becoming more and more human-like then no doubt some of us will fall for them. In regards to the concept of robots falling in love with us, we don’t know. This problem relates to the other minds problem. If we don’t know when robots are conscious then we don’t have any explanation as to whether or not they love us. Like a couple in a warped relationship we’ll just have to take their word for it.