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If you believe in crazy things, such as that a mysterious entity created the Universe, the Heaven and the Earth and control your destiny, you might as well skip that entry, you won't like it. If you are a 17 years old shampoo smelling brainless Justin Timberlake fan, you can skip it as well, you won't like it (how did you even find my website in the first place !). If you are none of the above but think that Love is magical, you can also save yourself some time and move along.

The ideas presented in this entry and not all mine, only the presentation is mine. This said I won't try to write down the original references, in part because I don't remember where I looked them up the first time but also because the first time I read some of them I was still closer from birth than having puberty :-)
All you need to know if that Artificial Intelligence (the academic subject) has got a lot to teach to social sciences, biology and philosophy.

The question that I am going to try and answer is what is Love ? In fact this question cannot be answered. Why ? Because asked like this it is too vague of a question. The thing is that what you experience of Love might be, and actually is, very different of what it actually is, at least very different of what you will have to do if one day you want to rebuild it yourself, say, as a new feature of a class of artificial beings that you are building (for fun, for work or as part of your academic research).

For instance, most people think of GPS as the little device (also known as TomTom, from the eponym primary manufacturer) in their car which gives them directions when they are traveling. In fact those devices are not GPS, and moreover their existence is only a secondary effect of the existence of GPS. GPS has nothing to do with cars, or even roads. The following animation is already a much better description of what GPS actually is (yes, the little colourful ball in the middle is Earth).





Coming back to Love, it is useful to know, for a start, that love (I am dropping the capital "L") is an emotion. An emotion, not a feeling. People often confuse emotion and feeling, but a feeling is nothing else than the conscious mind acknowledgement of an emotion. For instance: "I feel frustrated, because in my particular mind-state, the emotion of frustration as emerged" .

Now the problem is nothing else than identifying what emotions are. This part is easy. Emotions are techniques that the mind uses to speed up "conclusion reaching". Note that the human mind didn't just wake up one day and said "hey, let me come up with this emotion thing". Emotions are probably early optimisation techniques used by the human mind as part of its evolution towards consciousness. I would even say that it is probable that emotions are necessary optimisations techniques used in the development of anything which slowly (or more faster) is travelling towards consciousness.

Now I am going to say something very controversial: assuming (and that is not an expensive assumption) that computers in 2009 are primitive compared to what computers in 2039 will be, the same way that computers 30 years ago where infinitely insignificant compared to what they are now (by the way did you know that your mobile phone has orders of magnitude more processing power than the computer who sent men on the moon and then brought then back alive ?), then computers in 2039 will have some implementation of emotions. In simple words, computers in the future, in order to manage their own complexity or the increase of their internal architecture will have to experience things that are the same as our own emotions.

It is probable that the computer engineering folks won't call those mechanisms "emotions", they will probably come up with a more complicated and confusing, geeky sounding, term (to make their research papers look like more impressive), but in the end it won't be anything else than the very exact same optimisations techniques than the natural biologic mind came up with few millions (or maybe, in the case of love a couple of thousand) years ago.

So now you may think "Pascal you are freaking stupid, and beside I feel particularly offended by your writings because Romeo and Juliet is my favorite movie! I do not see computers looking at each other in the future and falling in love, this is insane!". No worries, we are talking about the exact same thing. Well, not exactly, I am talking about the implementation while you are talking about the interface :-)

In fact modern computers such as my current MacBook Pro already feel (more exactly "experience") at least one emotion: when the battery charge falls bellow a given threshold, then a very basic mechanism, called the PMU for Power Management Unit, which operates well below the Operating System itself, suddenly shuts down the computer to preserve the memory. If the OS was conscious, it would feel as powerless in front of this event as you were in front of "him" or "her" the last time you suddenly fell in love with someone.

My computer also have a sudden motion sensor which parks the hard drive head if the computer is suddenly accelerated (this happen when it falls down from a table, for instance). There is nothing your user level program can do to prevent this behaviour, but in that case I would actually call this a "reflex" rather than an emotion.

This said, I still haven't said what is important to know about those optimisations techniques. So let me say it in a simple way why they were needed in the first place. When you are building an entity which one day or another is going to become self aware and will spend most of its time "thinking", you need to make sure that some events are triggered without the help of "thinking", because "thinking" is slow and can be distracted or, even worse, can fail . Think, for instance, of what would happen if the PMU wasn't there and all the shutdown thing was under the control of the OS. First of all the computer would not start (you would have a chicken and egg problem), but assuming that the computer is already up and running, you would take the risk that when the time for shutdown comes, then the computer doesn't shut down because it was "busy doing something else".

So now, think about it. If humans had to think and have an entire reflexion process before arriving at the logical conclusion that they should probably get closer to each other and have sex, this would threaten the entire species survival. You cannot trust self aware entities with doing the right thing at the right time (just look at how us humans behave towards each others and all the time we spend justifying all the bad things we do). Thinking to get a good mark in your math exam, that fine, but having to think before having sex and babies, is not a good idea. So an optimisation technique was needed: bypassing the thinking part and arriving quicker at the conclusion. Where the conclusion is "Ho God, I so want to sleep with this guy/girl right now (^.^)"

So now, don't feel sad. You can still enjoy Romeo and Juliet, I do myself actually. All this was about the implementation. If you followed me correctly you understand that even if we know better (or totally) what love is, we still cannot control it. As self aware (and possibly clever) entities, we still have a lifetime of learning to know what should we actually do when we feel love.

Of course, Love is not only about personal relationships. There is the love of parents for their children, the altruistic love of the philanthropic towards his/her fellow beings. All the same. Shortcuts to arrive at certain conclusions, as well as doing certain things, without having to think (too much) about it.

Last thing. As they exists below the self aware mind level, and very close to the neuro endocrine systems, some emotions have direct access to some parts of the body that the mind doesn't directly control (just like the OS in itself doesn't really know how to shut the computer down). Emotions can modify the concentration of elements in your blood, the rhythm of your heart and more generally change about anything of your overall physical state, and are also responsible for that pain in the chest when you have sentimental problems.

Some of those side effects are useful, sometimes necessary, but some others (such as the "knife in chest pain" when you get dumped), are probably some defects in the way the all mind/body thing has evolved. I believe that one day we will have the technology to correct this.