Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie.
Speaker 1: Two questions. First of all, should humans love their technology?
Speaker 1: That's the first question. Second question, should technology love humans? Okay, um,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say yes and yes because I think that
Speaker 1: you can't stop love in any form, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that we and I think we we'll maybe
Speaker 1: make this case today. I don't know, or we'll just
Speaker 1: muddle the whole concept of love. But I do think
Speaker 1: that we can't help but to to love our technology
Speaker 1: and be attached to it, and eventually that will become
Speaker 1: this idea that robots will be programmed to love us
Speaker 1: because we just love love. Well, that that sounds sweet.
Speaker 1: But I think you can stop love. I think love
Speaker 1: is a very stoppable force. I think it's a virus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it persists. The viruses are stoppable, some of them. So
Speaker 1: if we have the ability to to stop some forms
Speaker 1: of love in their tracks. Because the first thing we
Speaker 1: need to discuss is, of course, the nature of love.
Speaker 1: What is love? Because love is a is just a
Speaker 1: word like love is a big tent that encompasses a
Speaker 1: lot of things. I mean, because you know, obviously there's
Speaker 1: a loved one feels for one's wife, there's a loved
Speaker 1: one feels for one's child. There's the love one feels
Speaker 1: for like a really good sandwich, And these are vastly
Speaker 1: different emotional states. Oh yeah, I think that Aristotle had
Speaker 1: a sandwich love category. Yeah. Yeah. You can kill a
Speaker 1: love for a sandwich if you just say, oh, well
Speaker 1: that actually that sandwich isn't very good for you, or
Speaker 1: those ingredients are really foul, or that restaurant got a
Speaker 1: really crippling and a health rating. Uh, And then you
Speaker 1: might be, oh, well, maybe I don't love this sandwich
Speaker 1: is much, or you could over indulge in the sandwich.
Speaker 1: Whereas it's harder to kill the love safe for you know,
Speaker 1: for a spouse or a child or something. Just because
Speaker 1: someone says, well, that kid's hair is a little weird.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna be like, oh well, okay, love removed
Speaker 1: generally generally speaking, sometimes how bad the hair is. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: did you know that what is love? Was the most
Speaker 1: searched phrase on Google in two thousand and twelve. Really,
Speaker 1: people want to know, were they looking for that song?
Speaker 1: Isn't that what is love? Baby don't hurt? That song?
Speaker 1: That what keeps saying it baby don't hurt me? Mm hmm,
Speaker 1: that's all I know. Yeah, No, I don't think it
Speaker 1: was that song, but I'm glad that we got to
Speaker 1: get you. That might have been the searches. We're just
Speaker 1: looking for those lyrics. It's possible, It's possible. But well, this,
Speaker 1: this idea that people are searching for the meaning of
Speaker 1: love had one Guardian article called what is Love talked
Speaker 1: to several different experts about their take on love, which
Speaker 1: was sort of interesting because again, here's this big, huge
Speaker 1: concept that has so many different meanings and so many
Speaker 1: different categories, and to the point where the word itself
Speaker 1: tends to lose meaning. You know, like when someone says, oh,
Speaker 1: I love something, it almost is a pointless thing to
Speaker 1: say because it's such an overused word that it we've
Speaker 1: we've just stripped it of all its power. That is true.
Speaker 1: I was just thinking that with my daughter, I don't
Speaker 1: like her to say the word hate. I oftentimes will say,
Speaker 1: do you truly hate that? You know? Is it just
Speaker 1: that you dislike it? Because that's a word that's very strong.
Speaker 1: But I never say do you really love that? Are
Speaker 1: you sure you love that? Because there's so much positivity
Speaker 1: associated with it. Uh. Theoretical physicist and science writer Jim
Speaker 1: Al Khalil had said that while lust is a temporary,
Speaker 1: passionate sexual desire involving the increased release of chemicals like
Speaker 1: testosterone and estrogen, he says that in true love or attachment,
Speaker 1: in bonding, the brain can release a whole set of
Speaker 1: chemicals pheromones, dopamine, nor epinephrin, UH, serotonin, oxytocin, embasso, pressant. So,
Speaker 1: he says, from an evolutionary perspective, love can be viewed
Speaker 1: as a survival tool, a mechanism that we evolve to
Speaker 1: promote long term relationships, mutual defense and parental support of children,
Speaker 1: and to promote feelings of safe safety insecurity. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: it's basically a chemical bond to things that enable us
Speaker 1: to better perform our genetic mission as organisms. There are
Speaker 1: several different versions of love. They're laid out in this
Speaker 1: this particular article. For instance, there's philia, the deep non
Speaker 1: sexual intimacy between close friends or family members or soldiers
Speaker 1: in the trench. You know, it's uh, it's this this
Speaker 1: bond of love that's you know, not sexual, not romantic,
Speaker 1: but it's it's you know, it's your your your bros
Speaker 1: kind of you know kind of love, bras bras bra love.
Speaker 1: I guess, Okay, Yeah, then there's a there's a lotus
Speaker 1: playful affection that found in fooling around or flirting. Now
Speaker 1: this one is I guess a little harder to like
Speaker 1: nail that. I mean, I guess I can think of
Speaker 1: some past example to that, you know, where you're kind
Speaker 1: of like flirty with somebody, but you're not really going
Speaker 1: after them per se. You know that it doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to be much to that one, right, because that's such
Speaker 1: an ephemeral stage. Yeah, it's kind of like like that
Speaker 1: one's just like I mean, that one can be killed
Speaker 1: by the sobering up a bit. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: like that's not it's barely love. It seems a little
Speaker 1: cheap to even classify it as a form of love,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. Yeah, then there's a pragma, the mature love
Speaker 1: that develops over a long period of time between long
Speaker 1: term couples. Uh. And this and this is really you know,
Speaker 1: when people talk about all that deep love that grows
Speaker 1: out of relationship because the relationship maybe may begin with
Speaker 1: lust or even this lootus thing we're talking about, or
Speaker 1: it may be begin with philia, but over time it
Speaker 1: develops into this strong bond, this bond where it's it's
Speaker 1: built over time and in a way that it just
Speaker 1: can't be uh, you know, pulled off a shelf, and
Speaker 1: it involves just a lot of goodwill towards another person.
Speaker 1: It's like wanting the best for someone regardless of the cost.
Speaker 1: So you might not have a huge surge in dopamine
Speaker 1: or vasopressin um or even oxytocin, but it's there. It's
Speaker 1: still you know, from from a chemical level, is still
Speaker 1: sort of running behind the scenes. Uh. Then there's a
Speaker 1: cape the more generalized love that I remember hearing a
Speaker 1: lot about in church. That's kind of like this sort
Speaker 1: of universal love love everybody, love your neighbor, right, even
Speaker 1: if it doesn't seem practical. Uh, it's just kind of
Speaker 1: an idealized, good natured, be cool of everyone, which you know,
Speaker 1: there is a good, good way to look at the
Speaker 1: world if you can, if you can do it, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of the seventies love hug. Then there is
Speaker 1: self love or philapia, which is uh is maybe not
Speaker 1: as selfish as it sounds, to be clear, and not
Speaker 1: talking about self love in the sexual context either, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no no. Um and uh yeah, this just means uh,
Speaker 1: I mean you can break it down to the fact
Speaker 1: that if you're gonna care about others, you need to
Speaker 1: be able to care about yourself. And then there's of
Speaker 1: course eros sexual passion and desire. Uh. And you know,
Speaker 1: and this is again when people talk about love at
Speaker 1: first sight in terms of a male female romantic relationship,
Speaker 1: this is often what they're actually talking about. I believe
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're talking about arrows. They're talking about
Speaker 1: lust and physical attraction, sexual attraction that may again eventually
Speaker 1: morph into some other form of love or just fall
Speaker 1: off entirely. Yeah. That's what I feel it should be
Speaker 1: astrict like, it's not really a form of love unless
Speaker 1: it becomes philia or pragma, yeah, or some other type
Speaker 1: of love. It's more like a pre love secretion or
Speaker 1: something I don't know, depends that you want to secretion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Because again we're talking a lot about about hormones flowing
Speaker 1: about about you know, your hormonal response to a potential
Speaker 1: may your hormonal response to um, you know, an infant,
Speaker 1: a child, you know, some sort of offspring. There's there's
Speaker 1: a lot of secreting going on. There is a lot
Speaker 1: of secreting, and you can't really secrete all of those
Speaker 1: for just one person, right, all those different types of love.
Speaker 1: I mean, perhaps there's that one rare person in your
Speaker 1: life that can take on all those roles of love,
Speaker 1: but most likely your family, your friends, your community take
Speaker 1: on all these different aspects of it. In this article,
Speaker 1: they also talk to a philosopher to talk about love
Speaker 1: as a passionate commitment, which really kind of flows in
Speaker 1: with the with the progment we were talking about. Yep,
Speaker 1: it says that we have to This is from Julian Baggini.
Speaker 1: The philosopher said that we need to nurture and develop it,
Speaker 1: even though it usually arrives in our lives unbidden. So
Speaker 1: you take this idea of what love could be, and
Speaker 1: then you begin to think about how we love objects
Speaker 1: or things, and I started to think about this idea
Speaker 1: of apophenia. Now, apophenia is um this sort of unmotivated
Speaker 1: seeing of a connection and a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness.
Speaker 1: That we ascribed to an object, and this was defined
Speaker 1: by German neurologists and psychologist Clause Conrad. So that means
Speaker 1: when you look at an inanimate object and you see
Speaker 1: what looks like a pair of eyes and a nose
Speaker 1: in the mouth, you're unconsciously try to make sense of
Speaker 1: the data in front of you, and you're describing it
Speaker 1: with something that is not what it actually is. Right,
Speaker 1: But it's our human context that we're bringing with us
Speaker 1: all the time, So we can't help to sort of
Speaker 1: project those humanness feelings onto something. Yeah, and um, as
Speaker 1: you've brought up before, the we have this surprising ability
Speaker 1: to see faces like you really you don't have to
Speaker 1: put a smiley face even on something to give it
Speaker 1: this sense of person and give it, I mean we can.
Speaker 1: We We glimpse faces in the clouds, we glimpse faces
Speaker 1: on the moon, and it's all just kind of this, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, this atavistic resonance where our pattern seeking brains
Speaker 1: are looking for things that affect us and what would
Speaker 1: affect us more than it's ap peering into the night
Speaker 1: and seeing the face of man or beast, you know,
Speaker 1: lurching there in the dark, that would be some vital
Speaker 1: information you need to know because friend or foe is
Speaker 1: is right upon you. Yeah. Actually, Sonia Wynn Hager, she's
Speaker 1: an anthropologist at the University of Vienna, said in an
Speaker 1: interview with Life Science that this tendency would have likely
Speaker 1: protected our ants susters and she said taking a bear
Speaker 1: for a stone might be lethal, but the opposite does
Speaker 1: no harm. Yeah, you get down to that whole thing
Speaker 1: of that whole situation with type one and type two airs.
Speaker 1: You know, one air means that, oh, you got me,
Speaker 1: You're not actually a bear trying to eat me, and
Speaker 1: the other air is, um, oh you're actually a bear
Speaker 1: and you just devoured me. So which one, obviously does
Speaker 1: evolution end up selected? Yeah, what's the error that you're
Speaker 1: going to have? And so then you have this apophenia,
Speaker 1: this pattern recognition, seeing patterns everywhere, and you meld that
Speaker 1: together with anthropomorphism, and that's giving human characteristics to animals
Speaker 1: and inanimate objects, and you begin to see that as humans,
Speaker 1: we are going to maybe shovel off some of our
Speaker 1: emotions onto these objects. And I wanted to bring up
Speaker 1: this study that wind Hagger and her colleagues UH conducted
Speaker 1: this this tendency for us to actually personify cars. Now,
Speaker 1: she conducted this this study, and auto never understood. You know,
Speaker 1: it happens all the time, especially in TV shows where
Speaker 1: someone's got a car and it's got this this lady's
Speaker 1: name night Rider. Well but that was what kit I think, yes,
Speaker 1: that that car actually talked and had personality and uh,
Speaker 1: and they loved each other. But it's that that's the
Speaker 1: fantasy of the relationship that some people want to have
Speaker 1: with their cars. I guess it comes off kind of
Speaker 1: cree creepy though, sometimes because it's like talking about his
Speaker 1: car in his fancy car has like a lady's name,
Speaker 1: and it's like there's an implied relationship there. That's kind
Speaker 1: of weird. Do do do do do? Do? Do? Do? Do?
Speaker 1: Do do do? All right, So, I mean people do
Speaker 1: have relationship with her with their cars. My daughter loves
Speaker 1: our car and she kisses it. It's very odd. Does
Speaker 1: it have a name though? Yeah? What Lightning the queen
Speaker 1: from the movie Cars, which probably has something to do
Speaker 1: with it. Right, Actually, the whole movie is that the
Speaker 1: animation is a great example of anthropomorphizing. Oh yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: Um alright, so whin Haggar's study in Austria that she
Speaker 1: reported in two thousand and eight that people attribute human
Speaker 1: traits to vehicles based on factors such as the shape
Speaker 1: of the headlights and the size of the windshield because
Speaker 1: as you've got the mouth there with the grill. She
Speaker 1: then took the study to rural Ethiopia where there would
Speaker 1: be less of a context right for for some of
Speaker 1: the ways that we operate in terms of car commercials
Speaker 1: and all all that sorts of stuff, And she found
Speaker 1: out that the eighty nine Ethiopians who compared forty nine
Speaker 1: renderings of cars along with nineteen different human traits including gender,
Speaker 1: also saw the cars in a very human way, and
Speaker 1: cars with slit like wide set headlights were judged as male,
Speaker 1: adult and dominant by both Austrians and Ethiopians, as were
Speaker 1: cars with smaller windshields and wider faces and smaller eyes
Speaker 1: and foreheads. Again, the foreheads equivalent to the car windshield
Speaker 1: were considered to be more masculine features and human faces.
Speaker 1: So they down that the cars that were considered childlike
Speaker 1: we're also considered more feminine, and this included closer set
Speaker 1: headlights and larger windshields. So interesting to see these two
Speaker 1: different cultures both ascribing human qualities to this. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's all sorts of weird emotional landscape here wrapped
Speaker 1: up and and de humanization and anthropomorphism, and those are
Speaker 1: really that's the same movement in different directions. I am
Speaker 1: either adding personhood to something that is not a person,
Speaker 1: or am I taking personhood away from something that is
Speaker 1: uh is a person or a head to some degree
Speaker 1: as a person. And then there's the whole person's head
Speaker 1: thing and yeah, which we all right, let's take a
Speaker 1: break and when we get back, we will talk about
Speaker 1: loving robots. All right, Hey, we're back. We're talking about anthromorphism, uh,
Speaker 1: persona vacation. We're taking objects and we're making them worthy
Speaker 1: of concern, protection, punishment, reward. Um we can as humans,
Speaker 1: we have this innate ability to personify anything. A pencil,
Speaker 1: a computer, a coffee table. We you know, we we
Speaker 1: get mad at a computer that's misbehaving on us. We
Speaker 1: start the shouting at it, calling it names. Uh, I've
Speaker 1: stubbed my toe on a coffee table, and I treat
Speaker 1: the coffee table like it's an enemy, Like I want
Speaker 1: to attack it for attacking me. Many coffee tables are
Speaker 1: the enemy. Yeah, um yeah, And if you look at
Speaker 1: that car study, then you can easily extrapolate that that,
Speaker 1: you know, us us humans connecting with robots would just
Speaker 1: be a logical conclusion, right exactly. But yeah, but we're
Speaker 1: getting into this stage where we are using robots. I
Speaker 1: mean already I have a robot vacuum cleaner in my house,
Speaker 1: you know, and uh and in their robot mont lawn mowers.
Speaker 1: We're looking at a future where robots will help care
Speaker 1: for our elderly. They're going to be in our hospitals,
Speaker 1: they're gonna be on our streets, and we're gonna be
Speaker 1: interacting with them all the time. So the same model applies.
Speaker 1: We We don't need to become more like robots to
Speaker 1: interact with the robots that care for us and and
Speaker 1: and do all these tasks. We want the robots to
Speaker 1: at least meet us halfway well and meeting us halfway.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought that up because it reminded me
Speaker 1: of an episode that we did called Living with Robots,
Speaker 1: and which we talked about the Lyric Project. And in
Speaker 1: the Lyric Project, they had something called the Robot House.
Speaker 1: Not to be confused with Robot House from Futurama, which
Speaker 1: was a robot the fraternity, right, and this is not
Speaker 1: also a new reality show by the way, at least
Speaker 1: not yet. It would be great, they should do it,
Speaker 1: but yeah, five weeks in the Robot House. Some some
Speaker 1: study participants took uh their place in this house and
Speaker 1: what they tried to figure out in this domestic setting
Speaker 1: is how annoyed with humans get when robots were programmed
Speaker 1: to sort of get in their space or not hand
Speaker 1: them something in the time that they expected the human
Speaker 1: expected the robot to hand them something. Yeah. Well, one
Speaker 1: great example is when we came back from our break,
Speaker 1: we both spoke at the same time, and our typical responses, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, you go first, and you're like, oh no, no,
Speaker 1: you go first, but you finished. But did try to
Speaker 1: match you there for a bit. But with a robot.
Speaker 1: One of the examples that often pointed out like, say
Speaker 1: you and a robot reach for the same object at
Speaker 1: the same time. Now, when humans do this, the typical
Speaker 1: response is going to be, oh, I'm sorry, you were
Speaker 1: reaching for that. You go ahead, you go ahead and
Speaker 1: have some of those snacks. I'll hold up. And then
Speaker 1: the other person will say no, no no, no, you do
Speaker 1: it now the robot. Is the robot gonna have any
Speaker 1: kind of programming that allows for that kind of consideration,
Speaker 1: or the robot simply gonna grab the snacks and then
Speaker 1: the human not realizing and you know, certainly the human
Speaker 1: is anthromomorphizing. They're they're they're regarding this machine as some
Speaker 1: sort of a human entity to some degree. How are
Speaker 1: they going to react? They're gonna think, oh, well, that's
Speaker 1: stinchy robot trying to get these snacks before I can
Speaker 1: have some. That's totally rude. So how do you You
Speaker 1: have to start thinking of ways to program the robot
Speaker 1: to behave in a human capacity and even these small
Speaker 1: little interactions just to avoid sort of subliminal hostility blossoming up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because what they found in this study is that people
Speaker 1: did start to think that the robots were doing things
Speaker 1: on purpose and and really starting to get angry with them.
Speaker 1: And this is not just a crazy one off experiment.
Speaker 1: That's really this This field of human robotics interaction, uh,
Speaker 1: is something that's only like a decade old. But the
Speaker 1: reason is there is because it is forthcoming, and you know,
Speaker 1: you do want some