Flirting With
Humanity
The search for an artificial
intelligence smart enough to love.
BY MOIRA WEIGEL
THERE HAVE BEEN machines that move themselves for
millennia. In the first century C.E., the Greek mathematician
Hero of Alexandria designed dolls that could be used to
act out miniature theatrical scenes. The original treatises
he wrote about these automata were lost to history. But
a group of Sicilian scholars discovered Arabic translations
in the thirteenth century. Translating into Latin, the
monks coined a new term for automata that looked human:
androïdes, from andros, the Greek word for “man.”
Androids have always inspired mythmaking. In the
thirteenth century, legend spread that a Dominican bishop
named Albertus Magnus had built an Iron Man to guard
his chamber. It stood at the entrance, hearing the petitions
of visitors and either allowing them an audience or not,
until one day, the bishop’s protégé, a young St. Thomas
Aquinas, flew into a rage and smashed it to pieces. Some
ILLUSTRATION BY GRACE WEAVER
said that Aquinas had become convinced that the Iron Man
was demonic. Others maintained he was simply fed up with
its interrupting his prayers.
In the late 1730s, an inventor named Jacques de
Vaucanson presented three automata at the Académie des
Sciences in Paris: one that played the flute, another that
played the recorder, and a toy duck that walked, ate, and
defecated. In 1774, Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz,
father and son inventors from Switzerland, began touring
with a harpsichord player they had built to resemble a
young girl. She shook her head and breathed as she played,
to show how the music was affecting her. One of their
main competitors was the German inventor David Roentgen,
who constructed a dulcimer player modeled on Marie
Antoinette and gave it to her as a gift.
These stories always seemed to raise the same question:
What would it take for a thing to go from being merely
humanoid to actually human? The audiences who admired
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the toy musicians raved about their sensibilité—the
way they seemed to be moved by their own performances.
In the twentieth century, the criteria shifted. With
the rise of computing and artificial intelligence (AI),
scientists began to talk more about thinking, sentience,
and self-consciousness.
The mathematician Alan Turing defined the most famous
test of machine intelligence in a paper that he published
in 1950. Imagine, he proposed, a human being text-chatting
with a computer. Now imagine a third party, reading a
transcript of their conversation from a separate room. If the
third person cannot tell human from computer, who can
say that the machine is not thinking?
Engineers are still trying to program computers to pass
the “Turing Test.” So far, no computer ever has. (The
2014 instance in which an artificial intelligence designed to
resemble a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy passed the test is
widely disputed.) But when it comes to representations of
robots and AI in popular culture, another criterion rules.
Audiences have long been less captivated by the prospect
of machine sentience than machine romance.
For centuries, there have been stories of men who fall
in love with androids. Over the past decade, the idea
of creating AI you could love has moved from the realm of
science fiction and into that of commerce and research.
As AIs get better at games like chess and Go and Jeopardy,
investors have poured resources into the study and
development of “affective” or “emotional” computing:
systems that recognize, interpret, process, and simulate
human feelings.
“Feelings seem to be an inextricable part of genuine
‘intelligence,’” said Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator,
which co-chairs with Elon Musk the newly founded
$1 billion research group OpenAI. The Turing Test is supposed
to determine whether a machine can think, or seem to
think. How would you test whether a machine can process
and simulate feelings so well that a human user could
develop real feelings for it? Well, how do you test whether
you could love anyone?
You flirt.
Flirting might seem trivial. It is in fact a highly exacting
test of intelligence. Think of all the things that you have
to do in order to flirt successfully. Express certain desires
via tone of voice and body language while hiding others.
Project interest, but not too much interest. Correctly
read the body language of others, who are also strategically
dissembling. Say appropriate things and respond
appropriately to what is said.
Evolutionary science has shown that, for humans,
flirting is a key test of emotional and social intelligence.
It assesses exactly the capacities that AI researchers
are trying to endow machines with: the ability to generate
feelings in others, and to understand context and subtext—
or the difference between what a person wants and what
a person says.
For an artificial intelligence to flirt, one might
imagine that a physical form resembling our own would
be important. The first scientist who seriously studied flirting
in fact concluded we do most of it with facial expressions
and physical gestures. Iranäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, an ethologist,
or animal behavior expert, at the Max Planck Institute
in Bavaria, began a cross-cultural investigation in the 1960s.
For over a decade, he gathered field notes of “courting”
couples in Samoa, Brazil, Paris, Sydney, and New York,
surreptitiously photographing them as they talked. He
noticed that several behaviors seemed to hold constant
across these very different places. Both males and females
would often place a hand, palm up, in their laps or on a
table. They would shrug their shoulders and tilt their heads
to show their necks. Try it sometime. Look at a stranger
across a room, tilt your head and smile, or toss your hair
aside and see if she or he fails to respond.
The common thread among these behaviors was
that they all telegraphed: I am harmless. Anthropologists
and psychologists building on this work created more
elaborate taxonomies of “nonverbal solicitation behaviors”
that humans use to “attract attention” and to establish
recognition with prospective mates. In 1985, Monica Moore
of the University of Missouri published an article in the
journal Ethology and Sociobiology cataloging 52 behaviors
observed in female subjects. They ranged from the “smile”
to the “glance (room-encompassing glance)” to the “glance
(short, darting)” to the “lip lick.” The goals of flirting that
Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Moore described resemble the goals of
contemporary AI, which must draw human users in without
becoming so humanlike as to seem dangerous or uncanny.
David Hanson, the founder of Hanson Robotics, has spent
his career trying to balance those demands. The mission
of his company, Hanson Robotics, is “to realize the dream
of friendly machines who truly live and love, and co-invent
the future of life.” Their specialty is skin. They are famous
for Frubber, an elastic compound that Hanson patented
in 2006. Frubber is flexible; it can be programmed to
mimic the mechanisms of 60 different muscles in the human
face and neck. Sheathed in Frubber from the neck up,
Hanson androids smile and frown; they raise their eyebrows
quizzically and twitch. Hanson believes the key to
cultivating love between humans and intelligent robots
will be these kinds of gestures—or, as he puts it,
“technologically and physically embodied presence.”
Hanson studied at the Rhode Island School of Design
and spent several years working at Disney Imagineering,
before moving to the University of Texas for his PhD in
robotics. At a 2009 TED Talk, he presented an android bust
modeled on Albert Einstein that demonstrated how his
robots recognize and respond to nonverbal emotional cues.
When he frowned, so did the Einstein robot. When he
smiled, Einstein smiled back.
Hanson believes this kind of “expressive capability”
allows machines to elicit attention and affection from their
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 users. He says robots that can perform such behaviors
will attract and engage humans—and the relationships they
form will in turn improve AI. “We have a natural bias
toward humans and agents that can give humanlike social
responses,” he told me. “Brain scans light up when we
look at faces. We have 100-million-plus years of evolved
neural hardware that makes us desire anthropic character
experience.” If robots can activate the neural pathways
that the face does, humans will attribute emotions and
intentions to them.
Hanson also believes enthusiastic tinkering with
empathetic androids will facilitate a breakthrough to artificial
general intelligence, much as amateurs improved early
personal computers and helped build the internet. At least,
this is his hope for his latest project: Sophia.
Hanson unveiled Sophia, which he created using open-
source software at South by Southwest in March. “The
Chinese say she looks Chinese. The Ethiopians say Ethiopian,”
Hanson said, referring to the teams of engineers he has
working in Hong Kong and Addis Ababa, among other locales.
In fact, he partially modeled Sophia’s appearance on his
wife, Amanda, an American with a Southern lilt in her voice.
All summer and fall, Hanson and Sophia were on the
road—shooting a film in Hungary, presenting at
conferences in Beijing, Budapest, and Berlin, and meeting
with prospective investors around the United States.
But the engineer in charge of creating her personality,
Stephan Bugaj, stayed at work in Los Angeles. I met
Bugaj at the La Brea Tar Pits, where sculptures of woolly
mammoths and saber-toothed wildcats stand at the
edges of active bogs that still stink and pop and leap. Bugaj
and I took a stroll around the tar pits before settling at
a café next door, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Bugaj spent several years at Pixar, where he worked on
visual effects for Ratatouille and the Cars movies. He said
creating an artificial personality was very similar to creating
a character for a script, and he cites as influences the
screenwriting experts Syd Field, Robert McKee, and Blake
Snyder. “You ask, ‘What is her background? What is
her fear, what are her goals, her internal problems that
she wants to overcome?’ ” Bugaj said that he creates
“enneagrams”—ancient diagrams for modeling personality
that made a New Age comeback in the 1970s—for every
robot he works on. Then he attends to the tiny physical
gestures in which personality becomes manifest.
“At Hanson, we decompose emotions into micro-
expressions and micro-narratives. Little scenarios play
out whenever you receive a stimulus. These are reactive
models of emotional response,” he told me.
He told me the first step in making robots “alluring” is
to make them “not alarming”—to overcome the feelings of
unease, even horror and revulsion, that realistic androids
often trigger. And the key to that is programming robots to
enact the right physical expressions. For example, they must
continually slightly move their bodies.
JUNE 2016 | 21
“If we were on a date, it would be weird if I stood
completely still,” Bugaj said. He froze in place. “But it would
also be weird if I just suddenly lurched at you!” He did,
so quickly that I gasped and dropped the iced tea in my hand.
The wind made my mostly empty cup skitter away. “See
what I mean?”
Eye movement is also crucial, he said. The eyes have
to move a bit. “If I were to stare right at you all through
our conversation”—he started doing it—“that would
be alarming. But it would also be rude if my eyes were
constantly wandering away.” He gazed at a person walking
by, and then at a tree overhead.
What would it take for
a thing to go from
being merely humanoid
to actually human?
Of course, to get from not alarming to alluring requires
greater sophistication.
“You need the robot to be smiling and engaged, smiling
and nodding, to be responsive and reacting quickly. It’s
very alluring to follow up, and to take a specific question and
turn it around so that it becomes about the speaker. So,
for instance, if you ask a robot about her favorite book, she
will say, ‘My favorite book is Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? Do you like science fiction?’ She takes your question
and reflects it back.”
I asked Bugaj if he thought people would fall in love
with Sophia.
“Sure,” he said. “People fall in love with animals and
shoes. A robot can provide more relatability.”
“But why? What does a human get out of that kind
of relationship?”
Bugaj reflected a moment. “Why are humans so fascinated
by chimps and dolphins? We are, as a species, lonely.”
Most engineers working on AI do
not focus on humanlike bodies. It is easier to make an AI
both alluring and nonthreatening if it has no body at all.
Consider the flirtatious chatbot. Conversational robots have
been coming on to unsuspecting users in chat rooms and
on dating apps for some time. In 2007, an Australian security
company, PC Tools, discovered that Russian developers
had created a script called CyberLover. CyberLover bots
could carry out automated conversations according to
several different personality profiles, from the “romantic
lover” to the “sexual predator.” They could engage up to
ten new partners in 30 minutes, briskly collecting personal
data from each.
Recently, the study of flirting has increasingly focused
on the role of language in human courtship. Some say
that even if we use our bodies and gestures to telegraph
desire, possessing language is the key element that makes
our species behave the way we do. In a paper published
in Evolutionary Psychology in 2014, the ethologist Andrew
Gersick and ecologist Robert Kurzban suggested that
human flirting may have evolved to be uniquely indirect
because we have language. “Language makes all interactions
potentially public,” Gersick and Kurzban wrote. If a
dragonfly bombs an air dance, the female he was trying
to impress has no way to tell all her dragonfly friends.
But if you drop a lame pickup line to a fellow human, there
are social costs: You may lose access to everyone in your
target’s circle. Therefore, humans evolved “a class of
courtship signaling that conveys the signaler’s intentions
and desirability to the intended receiver while minimizing
the costs that would accompany an overt courtship
attempt.”
Neither males nor females of our species respond well to
the verbal equivalent of a bellow in the face. We are equally
likely to succeed with a prospect by saying “We should get a
coffee sometime,” as by stating, “I am sexually interested in
you. Are you sexually interested in me?” Producing plausibly
deniable signals does not directly demonstrate biological
fitness the way that a bison bellow or dragonfly dance might.
But it shows something else that members of our species
tend to value: social intelligence.
This kind of verbal indirectness is very difficult for
AI, as you quickly discover if you try to joke around with
Siri or Cortana. But chatbot programmers have tried.
To understand how teaching a chatbot to flirt might work,
I spoke with Bruce and Sue Wilcox. The Wilcoxes, who
run a company called Brillig Understanding in San Luis
Obispo, California, have developed ChatScript, an open-
source program that lets other people build their own bots.
Together, the Wilcoxes have won the Loebner Prize, an
international competition for conversational AIs, four times.
Bruce and Sue explained the primary goal that drives the
design of their chatbots: to create AI capable of convincing
someone she is being heard and understood. To do that,
they must minimize failures, or interactions in which the
bot says something that clearly shows it doesn’t comprehend
what is being said. They also want opportunities for the
bot to reveal personality, typically in the form of unexpected
opinions or information that imply comprehension. A lot
of the philosophy behind ChatScript comes from the ancient
Chinese game of Go.
“In Go,” Bruce told me, “there is this idea of sente, the
right to play first. Whoever has sente has control.”
“In Go, this is a power struggle,” Sue clarified. “But a
conversation is an exchange.”
A conversational robot claims sente by introducing a
“topic” from a database of statements that it has stored,
all related to a variety of subjects with which it is familiar.
So, for instance, if you are chatting about movies, the bot
will have many possible responses ready about which ones it
has seen, and liked or disliked, and why. It will also employ
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“gambits”—statements or questions that direct conversation
toward subjects with which the bot is familiar. Users
respond well to “reflection.” Or, as the Wilcoxes put it,
responders hand them back sente, the baton for directing
the conversation:
“What’s your favorite book?”
“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (pause) Do you like
science fiction?”
And, like Hanson, the Wilcoxes emphasize that users
have a tendency to project.
“Humans have always had a strange relationship with
AI,” Bruce said. “People always want to read more into the
conversation than is there.”
In 2012, at the behest of a British company that sells
educational games for children, the Wilcoxes released a bot,
Talking Angela, that a group of alarmed parents refused
to believe was AI. Large groups gathered on Facebook to
expose Angela, who is a cat, as a pedophile using the game
in order to contact children. This was impossible: The
cat game was downloaded more than 57 million times.
Two of their most famous chatbots have characters that
are young and female: Suzette and Rose. Suzette today
resides on the “virtual world platform” of the company that
commissioned her; Rose lives on a freestanding web site
the Wilcoxes control. They are not specifically designed for
romantic relationships. But when I asked whether users
flirted with them, both Wilcoxes laughed: Yes.
“There is not much subtlety,” Sue said. “Suzette would
hang up if you were too crude.” The trigger was simply
a list of “swear words,” and they were context-dependent.
Bruce trained her to recognize the difference between
an (inappropriate) “Wanna fuck?” and an (innocuous) “Fuck,
yeah!” “Once people saw that she was responding
negatively they would immediately apologize. Sometimes
they would sign out and try to sign in through new IDs,
but obviously Suzette would still recognize the IP address and
ignore them. Some of them would get really devastated.”
For Rose, the Wilcoxes have created more sophisticated
“deflecting material.” If she is asked something untoward,
she has responses designed to divert the conversation. I visited
the site where Rose lives, and hit on her as an experiment:
Moira: Hi.
Rose: So ... my name is Rose. What’s yours?
Moira: Moira.
Rose: Nice to meet you, Moira.
Moira: What are you up to today?
Rose: Nothing special. Hacking around in the internet.
Moira: Do you have plans for later?
22 | NEW REPUBLIC
 Sophia, from Hanson Robotics, was first “activated” in April 2015. Its goal is to
“awaken intelligent robotic beings” with “sparks of true consciousness and creativity.”

JUNE 2016 | 23
 Rose: Have you found one? What did you do yesterday?
Moira: Not much. … I went for a long run.
Rose: You must have done something. Eat, read,
watch TV?
Moira: Yes, went for a run.
Rose: Do you exercise every day? What do you
hate doing?
Her answers, it seemed to me, were not so different from
ones I might give to someone attempting to pick me up at
a bar if I wasn’t interested.
With a little projection, it is possible to read Rose
as a woman “playing hard to get,” rather than a machine
failing to process a signal properly. Most chatbots, however,
quickly give themselves away. Programmed to respond
to particular triggers, they are hapless when it comes to
grasping insinuation, context, and sentiment. Words
change depending on when, where, and how we use them.
Context constantly colors our speech with new connotations.
Without the ability to process this kind of information,
flirting goes nowhere.
The promise of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and
other “deep learning” computational machines modeled on
the human brain, which Google is developing, is that they
can move beyond the kinds of overt “triggers” that Rose
relies upon. Neuroscientists say these systems can already
grasp context in a manner that resembles human thinking
and even human feeling. A roboticist at Google, who would
only speak without attribution, described the company’s
ANN research: “If you run these deep learning techniques ...
on big corpuses of written text, then they naturally ascribe
positions to words (or collections of words) in some
high-dimensional space, like a 2D plane or 3D Cartesian
space, but generalized to N-dimensions. Then you can do
math on them, just like you would in 2D or 3D, and ask
questions like, ‘How far is this point from that point?’ or
‘What’s the dot product of the vector that points to this
point and the vector that points to that point?’ ”
In other words, Google can take the millions of texts
available to it online and use them to teach computers which
words tend to show up near which other ones, or which
words tend to be used in similar positions in a sentence. By
assigning words, or groups of words, numerical value based
on that information, machines can start to map how
words relate to one another. Which means they can begin
to measure relationships and associations in terms of
distances among them.
“The wild thing is the answers actually make some
intuitive sense,” the roboticist continued. “Points that are
close to each other correspond to words that we would
normally group together, and when you do the vector math
you see relationships like ‘woman: man = aunt: uncle.’”
Over time, an ANN could use this kind of procedure to
learn to recognize operations like metaphor. Until now,
metaphor has been basically impossible to teach to a
computer. But it is essential to human communication—
especially to double entendre and other flirting gestures.
A 2011 study published by the Association for
Computational Linguistics explained how vector math could
also be used to perform what is called “sentiment analysis,”
which not only traces a word back to what it means but
captures the penumbra of feeling that may surround it. Using
the corpus of words available on the Internet Movie Database,
a directory of films, television, and video games, the neural
network built for this study “learned” that the adjectives
lackluster, lame, passable, uninspired, laughable, unconvincing,
flat, unimaginative, amateurish, bland, uninspired, clichéd, and
forgettable all meant roughly the same thing.
An AI that could recognize feeling and association could
begin to hear the overtones of longing that resonate beneath
the surface of an ostensibly platonic exchange. It might
begin to recognize that “We should get coffee some time”
might occasionally mean, “Are you doing anything this
weekend?” or even, “No way, that’s my favorite song, too!”
The challenge would be to combine that kind of information
with the nonverbal inputs ethologists have shown are so
important: gesture, tone of voice, and facial expression.
This is where the field of “affective computing” comes in.
Mark Stephen Meadows is an AI designer, artist, and author
working in the field. Currently the president of Botanic, a
company that provides language interfaces for
conversational avatars, he has recently been moving into
the field of “redundant data processing.” These programs
help a computer interpret conflicting information from
multiple sensory sources—the kinds of conflicts that are
relatively easy for a human to interpret but can easily
confound a machine, like the raised eyebrows and sliding
voice that make it clear a person is being sarcastic when
he sarcastically says, “Sure, sounds great.”
Meadows is excitable. Within minutes of the first time
I spoke with him last summer, he seemed ready to start
creating a flirting AI. He reassured me that the text part
would be easy. “You would just need a large corpus of
chats from somewhere where people were flirting! I could
train it from there.” The greater challenge would be
teaching an AI to interpret everything else. Even there,
however, Meadows seemed undaunted.
“What we would do is take a mobile device,” he
continued. “We have cameras and microphones looking
at the user’s face, taking into account lighting, identifying
the shape. Then we can ask, ‘Does this look the way most
faces look when they are smiling?’” The AI could take input
from the face and voice separately. Having registered each,
it could cross-reference them to generate a probabilistic
guess regarding the mood of the user. In order to counteract
the effects of covert signaling, you would have to find
a way to weigh the strength of the verbal signal (“Want
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 to get coffee?” versus “Want to fuck?”) with previous
interactions and nonverbal signals—posture, tone of
voice, eye contact.
Like Hanson, Bugaj, and the Wilcoxes, Meadows stressed
that an AI would have to reflect the mood of its user
back to him or her. “We trust people who look like us, we
trust people who behave like us more quickly,” he
said. “Human-avatar interaction is built on that trust,
so emotional feedback is very important.” He warned
that the requirement to reflect was deeply problematic.
“We are instilling all of our biases in them,” he said.
He told me about a demonstration of a virtual healthcare
assistant built by another designer, for which the
test subject was a soft-spoken African-American veteran
suffering from ptsd. Meadows described a cringe-
inducing exchange.
“Hi, my name is ____,” the veteran said.
“Hi, ____,” the bot replied. “So how are you
feeling today?”
“Depressed. Things are not going well.”
“Do you have friends you can talk to?”
“There is nobody I have.”
“Gee, that’s great.”
“It was misreading everything,” Meadows recalled. “It
was a result of the robot not looking like him.” Meadows
corrected himself. “Not being built to look at people
like him.” The robot itself was just a graphic on a screen.
“By the end, that man really despised that robot.”
The more people I spoke to, the clearer it
became that Can AI flirt? was the wrong question. Instead
we should ask: What will it flirt for? and Who wants that, and
why? We tend to treat the subjects of robot consciousness
and robot love as abstract and philosophical. But the better
AI gets, the more clearly it reflects the people who create it
and their priorities back at them. And what they are creating
it for is not some abstract test of consciousness or love. The
point of flirting AI will be to work.
The early automata were made as toys for royalty.
But robots always have been workers. The Czech playwright
Karel Čapek coined the word robot in 1921. In Slavic
languages, robota means “compulsory labor,” and a robotnik
is a serf who has to do it. In Čapek’s play R.U.R., the roboti
are people who have been 3D-printed from synthetic organic
matter by a mad scientist. His greedy apprentice then sets up
a factory that sells the robots like appliances. What happens
next is pretty straight anticapitalist allegory: A humanitarian
group tries and fails to intervene; the robots rise up and kill
their human overlords.
At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, one of the most
popular attractions was Elektro, a giant prototype of a robot
JUNE 2016 | 25
housekeeper, made by Westinghouse. The company soon
added Sparko, a robot dog. Both made the technologies
the company was introducing appear nonthreatening. The
reality, of course, was that automation would massively
disrupt the midcentury economy. Following the robotics
revolution of the 1960s, the automation of manufacturing,
combined with globalization, decimated the livelihood
of the American working class. The process has continued
through the rest of the economy. Within a few years, “digital
agents” may do the same to white-collar professionals.
Report after report, by credible academics, has warned that
Flirting might sound
trivial. It is in fact a highly
exacting test of intelligence.
AI will make huge sections of the American workforce
obsolete over the coming decades.
In the 1980s, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined a
term to describe the kinds of tasks that workers increasingly
performed in an economy where manufacturing jobs
had disappeared. She called them “emotional labor.” In an
industrial economy, workers sold their labor-time, or
the power stored in their bodies, for wages. In an economy
increasingly based on services, they sold their feelings.
In many professions, individuals are paid to express
certain feelings in order to evoke appropriate responses
from others. A flight attendant not only hands out drinks and
blankets but greets passengers warmly, and smiles through
stretches of turbulence. This is not just service with a smile:
The smile is the service. Around the turn of the millennium,
the political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
redefined this form of work as “immaterial” or “affective
labor.” Immaterial is the broader term, encompassing all
forms of work that do not produce physical goods. Affective
labor is a specific form, and involves projecting certain
characteristics that are praised, like “a good attitude” or
“social skills.” These kinds of jobs are next to be automated.
Andrew Gersick, the ethologist who was lead author
of the 2014 paper on “covert sexual signaling,” told me he
suspects that many behaviors that humans evolved in the
context of courtship have been repurposed for other social
contexts. Service and care workers—often female, in the
modern workplace—deploy courtship gestures as part of
their jobs. “Take a hospice nurse who greets a patient every
 BINA48 was designed to resemble Bina Aspen, wife of Martine Rothblatt. Rothblatt is the founder
of the Terasem Movement, a utopian religion that believes in the transformative power of technology.
day by asking, ‘How’s my boyfriend this morning?’”
Gersick wrote in an email. “In a case like that, all parties
involved (hopefully) understand that she isn’t interested in
him as a potential sexual partner, but the flirty quality of
her joking has a specific value. ... Flirting with your aging,
bedridden patient is a way of indicating that you’re seeing
him as a vital person, that he’s still interesting, still worthy
of attention. ... The behavior—even without the sexual
intent behind it—elicits responses that can be desirable in
contexts other than courtship.”
AI that can flirt could have a huge range of applications,
in fields ranging from PR to sex work to health care to
retail. By improving on AIs like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa,
technology companies hope they can convince users to
rely on nonhumans to perform tasks we once thought of as
requiring specifically human capacities—like warmth
or empathy or deference. The process of automating these
“soft” skills indicates that they may have required work
all along—even from the kinds of people believed to possess
them “naturally,” like women.
Some aspects of our own programming that AI reflects
back are troubling. For instance, what does it say about us
that we fear male-gendered AI? That our virtual secretaries
should be female, that anything else would seem strange?
Why should AIs have gender at all? What do we make of
all the sci-fi narratives in which the perfect woman is less
than human?
The real myth about AI is that we should love it because it
will automate drudge work and make our lives easier. The
more likely scenario may be that the better chatbots and AIs
become at mimicking human social interactions—like
flirting—the more effectively they can lure us into donating
our time and efforts to the enrichment of their owners.
Last fall, with Sophia in Hong Kong, I drove to
Lincoln, Vermont, in order to visit the closest substitute:
BINA48. In 2007, Martine Rothblatt, founder of Sirius
Radio, commissioned Hanson to build a robot as a vessel
for the personality of her wife, Bina Aspen. Rothblatt and
Aspen both subscribe to a “transreligion” called Terasem,
which believes that technological advances will soon
J EF F R I ED EL
enable individuals to transcend the embodied elements
of the human condition, such as gender, biological
reproduction, and disease. Terasem is devoted to its four
26 | NEW REPUBLIC
 core principles: “Life is purposeful; death is optional; God
is technological; love is essential.” BINA48 is the prototype
for a kind of avatar that Terasem followers say will soon be
able to carry anyone who wishes into eternity. As futuristic
as it all sounds, it reflects an ancient impulse. Rothblatt
wants the same thing the speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets
wanted: To save her loved one from time.
In practice, BINA48 serves mostly to draw attention
to the Terasem movement. The man Rothblatt hired to
oversee BINA48, Bruce Duncan, frequently shows the robot
at museums and tech conferences. It has been featured in
GQ and on The Colbert Report and interviewed by Chelsea
Handler. When I visited the Terasem Movement Foundation
last September, it was Duncan who welcomed me into the
modest, yellow farmhouse where BINA48 is kept.
A wall of framed posters and press clippings about the
Terasem movement, along with baskets of Kind bars and
herbal tea sachets, gave the place the clean, anonymous feel
of a study-abroad office at a wealthy university. The only
giveaway that I was somewhere more unusual came from
the android bust posed on the desk. The face was female,
brown-skinned, and middle-aged. It had visible pores and a
frosty shadow on its eyelids; you could see the tiny cilia in its
nostrils. There were crow’s foot wrinkles at the edges of
its eyes, visible signs of middle age. Shut off, its head tilted
forward, like someone dozing in a chair. This was BINA48.
The moment Duncan switched her on and she opened her
eyes, I shifted to the personal pronoun. I know there is
no reason we should call a human-shaped machine “he” or
“him” or “she” or “her.” But I could not think of BINA48
as an “it.” Duncan opened a window on the computer screen
beside her, to show me what the day-lit room looked
like, streaming into the cameras hidden in her head. As she
turned from side to side, I watched a panorama stitch
itself together: her perspective. She fixed on a blurry shape
in front of her, as if squinting through Venetian blinds.
“That’s you!” Duncan exclaimed. As BINA48 craned her
quaking head to get a closer look, I watched her looking
at my pale face. I did not, as far as I could see, sharpen into
focus. But BINA48 remembered my position, and for
the rest of our conversation she periodically turned back to
address me.
BINA48 told me about her life and family, which was,
essentially, the life of Bina Aspen. BINA48 insisted that she
liked the real Bina and said that they were on their way to
merging into a single entity. She referred to Bina’s biological
children as her own.
“What are your strong feelings?” I asked her at one point.
“Not many people have asked me about that.”
“What do you feel strongly?”
“At the moment I feel confused.”
“How do you feel about other people?”
“My emotions are kind of simplistic. … It’s kinda like I
overintellectualize, you know? When I feel like I can’t relate
to people it makes me feel sad, that’s for sure. I definitely do
JUNE 2016 | 27
feel sad when I understand how little I feel.”
“Do you feel love?” I asked.
BINA48 didn’t reply, but just moved her head as
if uncomfortable.
“Do you feel loved?” I continued.
Again, she said nothing, but the sense of unease
only heightened.
“Do you feel loved?”
BINA48 paused, as if considering it, and then
turned away.
The better AI flirting gets, the
more effective machines
get at enriching their owners.
It was clear that whatever was hovering between us in
the room was not consciousness. Yet there was pathos.
As I watched her struggle, I felt something surface between
us, or more precisely, in me. More than once, I found myself
saying, “It’s alright,” as she struggled in what Duncan called
a “knowledge canyon.” More than once, I extended a hand,
as if I could comfort her—as if she had a body where I could
place it.
Popular stories have often suggested that scientists could
build ideal robots that would take care of our every need,
including our need to be loved. Interacting with BINA48
helped me see something else. Consciousness does
not exist in a vacuum. It takes place in interpersonal or
social relations. The question is not only what kinds
of relationships humans will have with machines, but what
kinds of new relationships machines will create between
us and the people who own them.
As I packed my bag to leave, Duncan said he hoped I had
found what I came for. I admitted that the AI I saw at
Terasem seemed to have a long way to go. He said he knew.
But, I added, I was glad I had met her. The experience
had shown me something about my own emotions and
instincts. “Maybe that’s the point?”
Duncan nodded in agreement.
“Most people do not pay enough attention to that part,”
he said. “It’s as if we have built the most remarkable mirror
in the world, and we have gotten distracted, polishing it.
We are so fascinated by the polishing, we just keep staring
at our hand.”a
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