Linden Lab recently ran a blog post : Production Company Seeking UK Residents for TV Documentary, the gist of this is that a company called Back2back Productions are seeking couples who have met online and now have a solid relationship/marriage outside the virtual world. However they are also seeking couples who have not yet made the jump from virtual reality to actual reality, for the purposes of this production one half of the couple should be UK based, more details, including whom to contact, are in the blog post.

There is an issue with these sort of relationships in so much as is it the avatar or the person behind the avatar that falls in love? What is the initial attraction, whereas the idea that someone falls for an avatar may sound far fetched, this sort of subject matter was sort of covered in a recent article in The Guardian, which goes a stage further than wondering if people are attracted to avatars of other humans and asks : Will we ever have love affairs with video game characters? That article is a fabulous read and starts with a premise based on the film Her, where the main character falls in love with his operating system.

Whereas there’s a key difference between someone falling for a NPC instead of a character powered by a human being, there is definitely potential for some crossover. The article is really coming from an artificial intelligence point of view, with the idea that as artificial intelligence gets more sophisticated, the potential for people to be attracted to that artificial intelligence will become more likely. The idea that an artificial character can learn more about the person as they go along is the basis of a relationship, that’s how relationships grow. Games are becoming smarter with their artificial intelligence processes and the article gives some examples :

Elsewhere, Maxis, the creator of the Sims series of life simulations is expanding the AI and emotional responses of the characters for Sims 4, finely tuning them to what the player does. And Second Life developer Linden Lab recently ran a gaming experiment named Versu, a sort of choose-you-own-adventure ebook in which reader actions combined with AI characters to modify the story.

Sigh, Versu, seriously, this should not be gathering dust! However, back to the point, as the intelligence of computer characters grows, will the lines between reality and virtual reality get more and more blurred? Well part of the equation will be whether the NPC falls for the person they’re interacting with, but that sort of interaction could well be possible, Gartner researcher, Jackie Fenn is quoted as saying :

Humour and creativity will be among the more challenging areas for artificial intelligence, but even here researchers are experimenting with clever algorithms and deep learning. If a computer can learn what makes people laugh – and more importantly what makes you laugh – based on watching and analysing over time, there is no theoretical reason that a computer couldn’t eventually display and respond to humour. Similarly with music or art – by experimenting, analysing and learning, it could figure out which compositions create the best emotional resonance in the human brain.

However game designer and artificial intelligence researcher Luke Dicken is a lot more cautious :

I think it’s a really thorny notion, If a character is programmed to love the player, can that ever truly be reciprocal since it’s also effectively non-consensual? If you’re programmed with the capacity to love and you use that capacity, is that true reciprocity or has the player ’gamed the system’ to cause it to happen? It’s really interesting the asymmetry it introduces in that the participants are less on an equal footing than in a traditional relationship because a virtual character will always be constrained by their programming. You could maybe argue that the same is true for humans – although that opens a whole other philosophical avenue – but two humans are equally unknowable and complex to each other.

However what is to stop the sort of long distance relationship that can be created online in virtual worlds such as Second Life being changed to the stage where one of the partners isn’t real? Luke Dicken again :

Many long distance relationships could already be taken over by an AI system that talked to you on Facebook and played a game like World of Warcraft with you. I think that its going to end up more of a service and a virtual pet than a true partnership though, because there are inherent limitations that would prevent an equal partnership. I don’t know – we’re easily 20 years from being close to having to worry about this. More probably.

There’s a lot more in the article, a hell of a lot more. These concepts aren’t exactly new, films such as Barbarella and Blade Runner have in many ways covered concepts where human interaction is replaced with interaction with a machine, that’s really the stage after NPC’s start to become the centre of attraction for some.

Will this ever happen? Quite possibly but as good as artificial intelligence gets, it’s never going to be able to replace true physical human interaction, nor the chaos theory aspect where people who according to the stats shouldn’t be attracted to each other, are attracted to each other. Whereas the subject matter is to me, extremely fascinating, it’s also extremely unlikely to become a reality … is it?

I’ll leave you with a link to a fantasy spoof of Stephen Hawking falling for Davros!

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