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The Ladder of Love
In Plato’s dialogue Symposium, Socrates relates to the other dinner party guests a theory of love that a philosopher called Diotima explained to him.
She describes love as a ladder that begins with Bodily Love, or Eros, which is infatuation, intense emotions, a desire to be close to the other, to smile, to touch them.
The next rung is Soul Love, or Philia, which you discover once you spend much time with the object of your infatuation, and realise that many other people in the world possess the characteristics that could inspire this Eros. You notice other things that make this person special above those characteristics and which relate to their individuality (personality, thoughts, ideas, experiences, world, etc.). These are the characteristics that inspire Philia, or love for the soul, for that which is invisible at first-sight and requires knowledge of the other.
But then, similarly to the transition from Eros to Philia, you come to realise that many other people in the world possess all these characteristics that you love. Even if you can consider the person unique, you can love other people with as much sincere appreciation as them because they possess these characteristics.
So you climb to the third rung which is Concept Love; you discover that you love the concepts that these persons, object of your Eros and Philia, embody. Thus, you realise that seeking the presence or embodiment of these concepts, being close to them, nurturing them, will bring you the pleasure of a pure kind of love fulfilled.
The ladder goes up three more rungs: a love for the institutions, laws, cultural ideas, etc. that laid the grounds for these people to become who they are -or for the people that made them who they are- and flourish. Then there is a love of knowledge itself, since it is by acquiring or creating knowledge that one can nurture, inspire, perpetuate, share or create what allows these beautiful things to exist, flourish and reproduce.
Finally, according to her, the ultimate type of love is a love of the purest form of beauty itself: in classic Platonic fashion, it transcends all individual instances of beauty and is directed towards the universal and eternal essence of beauty. It is the eternal truths, the form of beauty that is present in all beautiful things but transcends them all as one single universal form. It is seeking the essence of beauty in its purest form, which is the ultimate source of everything you come to love from the other rungs of the ladder.
Plato Asimov, the Roboticist
General purpose humanoid robots are increasingly becoming a reality. Instead of multiple robots doing the only task they are good for over and over, a general purpose robot can do multiple tasks by itself1.
Isaac Asimov was an American science fiction writer and professor. One of his major claims to fame is his enormous corpus of fiction that speculates on how the advent of AI humanoid robots and their insertion in society will unfold. His famous Three Laws of Robotic are pioneering in the field of AI ethical alignment: how do we make sure that such powerful entities like autonomous AIs will not act unethically, against the interests of humanity?
And aside from ethical alignment, several questions arise on the possibility of love between a human being and an AI. Is it appropriate that a human love an AI as they would love another person? What are the implications of this? Is it the same kind of love, or is it another kind of love, like the one underlying our links with other animals?
If we take Plato’s interpretation of what love is, it is imaginable that a robot be the object of human love in a way that doesn’t substitute human love but instead emanates from the single same human will to love.
If we look further than such inventions that will soon become a reality as robots providing sexual/sensual services (a form of Eros) or AI conversational companions (a form of Philia), we find that love for a robot can be considered as more palatable through the lens of Concept Love.
After all, why wouldn’t we find the programming of a robot beautiful if it instills in its behaviour all of the concepts that we find embodied in all the people that we come to love, especially in a Philia manner?
It is a particular kind of love, because we are not loving the robot itself, but all those concepts it embodies -or more accurately, that it has built into it-. Moreover, it is a special manifestation of Concept Love that moves beyond what a work of art or a technical artefact could also embody. A robot’s general-purpose autonomy and conceptually restricted agency are what make it one of the most adequate manifestations of the idea of Concept Love. They are not single-purpose or static which would make them just a repetitive and rigid, devoid of agency being. To be clear, by rigidity I mean that it wouldn’t adapt to a change of context or other challenges that would make it impossible for them to exercise their ‘virtue’ or ‘conceptually beautiful’ potentiality. A general-purpose robot -and even more so autonomous AI- is by definition adaptive, which means that it has a much better chance to exercise its ‘conceptual virtues’ in any context. In other words, the adaptive robot becomes an entity that emanates these beautiful concepts into the world.2
Yes, robots are not human and probably we cannot love them as such, but by running this thought experiment from Plato’s Ladder of Love, it is not too hard to imagine that they would still be worthy of love, even if they aren’t even a living thing. A robot doesn’t need to become a so-called ‘sentient AI’ for it to be justifiable to find them beautiful and deserving love.
Beautiful, lovable robots do not need to fully resemble human beings. They could take many different shapes, such as possessing the connection with nature and innocence of some harmless animals that we as humans have universally loved, and the ability to communicate with us and become involved in the enjoyment of social situations. And this is only one of countless examples.
- Source: https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/25/general-purpose-humanoid-robots-bill-gates-is-a-believer/ ↩︎
- Beautiful concepts or conceptual virtues are just ways of referring to concepts we would find we repeatedly love in the people we find beautiful. They vary according to each person; for example, a conceptual virtue could be a lust for life, or generosity, wisdom, spontaneity, the list is almost infinite. ↩︎
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