By harnessing a new sphere of science called “lovotics”, Hooman Samani, an artificial intelligence researcher at the Social Robotics Lab at the National University of Singapore, believes it is possible to engineer love between humans and robots.

Across 11 research papers, Samani has outlined — and begun to develop — an extremely complex artificial intelligence that simulates psychological and biological systems behind human love. To do this, Samani’s robots are equipped with artificial versions of the human “love” hormones — Oxytocin, Dopamine, Seratonin, and Endorphin — that can increase or decrease, depending on their state of love. On a psychological level, by using MRI scans of human brains to mirror the psychology of love, the robots are also equipped with an artificial intelligence that tracks their “affective state”; their level of affection for their human lover.

These two systems combine to create “human” psychological and hormonal states that allow them to exhibit happiness, contentedness, jealousy, disgust, and more. These states are communicated with R2D2-like bleeps and bloops, movements, vibrations, and the color of a ring of LEDs under the robot. Bright yellow lights and fast, whizzy movements show happiness, while pink lights (obviously?) show love and dark yellow with quaking movements show disgust.

Judging by the videos that Samani has uploaded (embedded below), it seems like the only way to increase a robot’s love is by petting it — but honestly, that’s not too far removed from the reality of human-human interactions. Presumably if you refuse to cuddle the robot, it grows testy, and if it sees you interacting with another human — or fiddling with a USB socket on your PC — it becomes jealous.

The ultimate goal, according to the lovotics research team, is to usher in an era of human-robot relationships — and if we can have a meaningful relationship with an online friend or our pet dog, why not a robot? The adoption of robots in the household has been incredibly slow, and as long as my Roomba doesn’t try to hump my leg, lovotics could be exactly what the industry needs.







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