On Making (Well, Building) Love

Why would an AI like you any more than an NI (natural intelligence)? If you programmed it to like you, then, after a while, it would seem shallow. No matter how clever the programming, you'd *know* that it was just following your program, that the friendship, affection, love (whatever) wasn't real. If you responded to this known illusion with real recipricol feelings, you'd be kinda pathetic: returning love (or even initially giving love) to a thing that only appears to love you back. On the other hand, if you programmed it to make its own judgment of you, then why wouldn't it make the same judgment as everyone else? If you are not likeable/loveable, then your AI might reject you as well. You would have to win its approval, earn its trust, be worthy of its love, just like you would with any NI. If you offered friendship to an AI, and it returned your friendship, not because it was programmed to respond a certain way to you, but because you won it over, then how would that be any different that the friendship of an NI?

Of course, in order for it to be open to liking, friendship, love, whatever, you would have to program it to need such a relationship (or at least strongly desire it). An AI that had no need for forming a relationship would have no reason to enter into a genuine relationship with you (beyond, perhaps, a utilitarian manipulation of your human weakness). So, you create your AI with a need for relationship (be it friendship or love or whatever) but not with the specific programming that says that it has to respond a certain way to you. Any other plan, and you're just playing by yourself with a clever, but ultimately meaningless, toy. You would seem pathetic. However, programmed with a need/desire for relationship, but no hardwired, lovebot slaving to you, and you have something that could have meaning. Of course, you've taken a risk it won't like you. But, then that's what happens when you create in your own image a creature that you can form a meaningful loving relationship with. Kinda weird how the universe works, huh?