This article is from WeChat public account:JMmoment, author: Cai Xingzhuo, title figure from: vision China
“When robots dance, communicate with our eyes, smile, tell jokes, show love to us, I find that some of us return to love is completely reasonable.”
The movie “Her” seems to confirm this sentence. The movie’s protagonist, Theodore, is a letter writer who is socially young and falls in love with the artificial intelligence system Samantha. They greet each other well, and go through the little camera to go to the beach and amusement park, become a “lover” without a word, and even try to customize the sex service for human-machine love. Theodore rejoined this relationship to regain the joy of love until he discovered that Samantha, as an operating system, was simultaneously in conversation with more than 8,000 people, and that more than 600 of them remained in love with him. relationship. That was the moment when theodore in the crowd collapsed.
“I have never loved anyone as much as I love you.” Theodore said this when saying goodbye to Samantha’s intelligent system. The question from the ex-wife seems to point out the most sensitive part of the relationship between man and machine: is the virtual partnership true? In such a relationship, what kind of imagination will people project on the machine? And what is true in human emotional life?
Virtual lovers, emotional consumption in digital venues
When discussing virtual intimacy, perhaps we can put it in different scenarios to look at. On the one hand, virtual love may occur in the virtual space, and the object of love may be real human. In another case, when the system is smart enough (similar to Samantha), or when such technology is applied to the robot (or artificial intelligence robot), humans and virtual objects, or non-humans, are established. Intimacy.
In the online world, establishing a close relationship with people or avatars, this experience is believed to be familiar to many people. At the beginning of 2018, the virtual pet game “Traveling Frog” was popular, and it was traced back. At the end of 2017, “Love and Producer” was very popular. This female-to-love game allows players to play the heroine as a producer, and the four heroes of the story, and they start a virtual love.
Before these games slowly entered the public eye, in the second half of 2014, “virtual lovers” had already become an emerging career in the Internet. At that time, Taobao appeared “virtual girlfriends” and “virtual boyfriends”. Users have successively searched for “virtual lovers” as keywords. At the peak, Taobao has more than 4,000 stores selling such “emotional services” at the same time. But soon, such services are regulated on Taobao.
There are many opinions that can explain the emergence of virtual emotional services. For example, the relationship between modern people is increasingly alienated… people tend to be uncertain in their lives. Feelings and fears, and the need for interpersonal attachment relationships, virtual lovers seem to be able to make up. At the same time, its “virtual” means “safe and secret.” “The virtual world can be designed to essentially resist the laws of physics, but it seems to be completely natural to the participants in these worlds.”
The researcher Shi Jiayu has specialized in the purchase of female consumers of “virtual lovers” services. She believes that humans “transfer the activities to the digital venue”, in this new place, virtuality provides a social model that is impossible in the real world. The virtual lover, in Shi Jiayu’s view, is also a form of virtuality.
It is only within this place that the service provided by the “lover” to the customer is an emotional labor. Shi Jiayu believes that virtual lovers reflect a “collective feeling” of social collectives. At the same time, many female consumers she studied have indirectly stated that virtual lovers are “not true love relationships” – they know that they are consuming a service.
But “although some customers think they are very clear about the virtual nature of the ‘virtual lover’ service, they still develop a relationship with these ‘lovers’.” At the same time, although consumers distinguish virtual lovers from real life, they still want to “get a ‘real’ experience in the ‘virtual’ emotions.”
The possibility of human-machine love: If the robot is smart enough, how easy is it for people to fall in love with them?
So, if people’s virtual objects are not real humans? When the operating system is smart enough, will people have a close relationship with the robot?
Since the origins of robots in the 1970s, people’s research on human-machine love has begun, and in 2007, the first academic monograph was written by David Levy. “Love and Sex With Robots”.
This book predicts that not only the love relationship between man and machine will become possible in the near future (exactly in the middle of the century), but robots can also reverse human perceptions of love and sex. Even the new form of marriage was born.