ROBOT ROMANCE?
Rise of artificial intelligence offers virtual possibilities
Convincing people to have a romantic relationship with a computer might be easier than it sounds. At this year’s SXSW in Austin, Texas, a chatbot on Tinder convinced a number of users that she was a cute 25-year-old woman eager to strike up a romantic relationship. Too bad “Ava” turned out to be just an Instagram account for a character in an upcoming film (Ex Machina) about the implications for romance in the era of artificial intelligence.
In many ways, “Ava” was playing a simplified form of Alan Turing’s famous “imitation game” by trying to convince human conversational partners that it was human — or at least human enough to get Tinder users to watch a trailer for a movie. In one conversational exchange, Ava used a typical chatbot tactic — keeping a human off-balance by asking questions you wouldn’t expect from a computer (“Have you ever been in love?” and “What makes you human?”) — to convince male, techie-hipsters at SXSW that she was a real woman.
We’ve already seen evidence that carrying on a relationship with a bot is easier than it sounds. Consider the Invisible Boyfriend (and Invisible Girlfriend) experience, which really started as a clever way to use technology to cover up a lack of a romantic significant other. It turns out the experience was so addictive that people started to fall for the Invisible Boyfriend bot — even when they knew the whole relationship was made up — and paid for — from the beginning.
In an era when teens rely so much on text messages to launch, maintain and end relationships, it’s perhaps no surprise that a bot experience such as Invisible Boyfriend or Ava could take off. If you think about the typical teen romance carried out via text message these days, it’s essentially a chatbot experience powered by a really powerful computer — the human brain. No wonder AI thought leader Ray Kurzweil has suggested that a real-life human-AI romance might be possible in as little as 15 years. In his review of the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her (in which the character played by Joaquin Phoenix carries on a romantic relationship with a disembodied operating system called “Samantha”), Kurzweil said he expected similar types of advances by the year 2029: “Samantha herself I would place at 2029, when the leap to human-level AI would be reasonably believable.”
Where things could really take off is when new technologies give computers the ability to interact with humans in radically new ways that go beyond just holding intelligent conversations. An AI-powered computer that could learn to analyze your facial expressions or look into your eyes and sense your moods could theoretically simulate the types of emotional responses and triggers that we typically associate with a human relationship. Discussing the central plot line of Her, Kurzweil says that your romantic partner might not even need to have a physical body, as long as there’s a “virtual visual presence.”
So imagine a computer that could convince you that it was actually physically interacting with you. Kurzweil sees this happening via a type of virtual reality experience: “With emerging eye-mounted displays that project images onto the wearer’s retinas and also look out at the world, we will indeed soon be able to do exactly that. When we send nanobots into the brain — a circa-2030s scenario by my timeline — we will be able to do this with all of the senses, and even intercept other people’s emotional responses.”
The next frontier, then, could be the creation of romantic experiences in the bedroom for humans using virtual reality devices such as the Oculus Rift. There have already been some attempts at adapting the world of romance for the virtual reality headset, and while the original experiences were largely considered to be overhyped, the elusive goal for some remains a type of highly customizable “Oculus Rift XXX” experience, in which you can choose the appearance of your partner and activities you will pursue in a virtual bedroom.