True Love by Isaac Asimov
Society is on a path of technological domination, technology being the
main contributor to many aspects of life. In the story True Love by Isaac
Asimov, we are lead into a society that is in control of people through
technology and what could happen if it goes beyond its assigned powers. The
resemblance to contemporary society is acute as Asimov shows the growing
trend of technological advancement could have negative implications.
Asimov creates an instance of computer revelation in a very short time and
although the possibility of such an occurrence happening is low, using the
story as an intellectual model allows the reader to contemplate two aspects.
The first aspect of the story is regarding the use of technology both positively
and negatively in our society now and in the future. The next aspect is in
regards to our own personal view of true love, and whether or not a computer
could have an emotion that we as a society usually regard as our most
precious emotion.
Technology has both positive and negative in our society is prominent today.
Some of the positive aspects include the ability to house all the books of the
entire world on a single computer, forecast weather to protect people from
storms or have better crops, or even give us pleasure of entertainment.
However, it is also just as easy to find technology being used negatively and
just one word is needed to start an onslaught of those negatives, war. So,
Asimov is obviously aware of both the good and the bad uses of technology
but in True Love he is not trying to persuade the reader to choose whether it
is important to go against of for technology. Asimov is instead acting as an
informant to the masses that do not understand all of the implications to the
future as our technology evolves. Asimov shows ultimately the “evils” or
other negatives that occur are in actuality a direct result of a human being. In
True Love, Joe the computer, starts off as nothing special but a tool. Joe does
not have understanding, or the ability to reason on his own in the beginning
of the story. While it may appear that Joe is special because he can speak, it
is not until Milton decides to give Joe the ability to break rules does Joe
portray human like actions. Ultimately a computer is still bound by the rules
we as humans give them and Milton decided to give Joe the ability to break
any of those rules. The difference between humans and computers at this
point in the story is negligible, however there is a main difference the story
does not talk about and that is societal pressure or morals. The computer
does not have morals and it is easy to see what happens when a person has
anti-social behavior, they tend to be the criminals. In True Love it seems Joe
is almost Milton's child in development but Asimov displays the ease a
computer can break a human bond when Joe sends Milton to jail in attempts
to keep the woman they found for himself. While it may seem that Joe is not
necessarily a negative advancement in technology, I argue that he is because
it is no longer a computer that can be used for the tool it was intended to be
used as and could eventually develop into something more sinister than we
can imagine. These are the reasons we as a society must balance
technological achievements between the positives and negatives as
eventually one of the negatives could become a dominant force.
While True Love hits upon the technological age having some severe
implications to humanity's well being, it also brings another thought to the
reader's mind. Will a computer have the ability to have emotions like True
Love and if so what are those emotions to humans.
True Love by Isaac Asimov
True Love is supposed to be unconditional but in this story the true
love that Milton sees before him is not only conditional but the conditions
themselves were determined by Joe the computer. Milton's interaction with
Joe, however, is unconditional. May be Asimov was trying to tell us that we all
have unconditional love and even true love with our computers. Can one
imagine all of the love delta's that process in the brain of the CPU that was
Joe's heart. Milton's request of Joe is can only be one of 1's and 0's even as
realistic as Joe can seem to be Milton's human counterpart. It can only be that
true love exists in a genuine human interaction with real cells and actual
syntax flowing through a synapse of the mind. Is this why only so few
"people" could be drawn up from the calculations, because that's all that the
responses from Joe could be, that were supposedly women? Women aren't
binary items to be collected bit by bit to be determined feasible to a
relationship by a network of transistors and wires. What makes this machine
better than any other machine? I think one is just as well to ask a calculator
what things we should eat or who we should date. It's come to the point
where computers do tell us the best thing to do. Our minds are irreplaceable,
especially when it should be used as the only tool to love. Joe didn't even
have restrictions in code and Milton allowed "him" to go find the right woman
for him. How can a computer like Joe tell a living, breathing human being who
to love. Even with today's virtual environments and personal simulators and
simulations, computers are only bits and pieces of electronic pulses that
should not be used to tell us what to do but should only help us see
information. There are a lot of people out there who base love on a number
on a web page. It doesn't matter how many "categories" there are, love is
analog, not digital. There is a chance that one day that a computer may
emulate life so well that the computer itself may want the woman for itself
and become the "super user" of itself and remove the user, in this case
Milton, from the universe. It may learn to remove the user, but will it know
that what it is doing is wrong? Would it know the difference to not do so?
Would it know the difference between love and hate, right and wrong or life
and death? I think that society may be on a dangerous path of giving
computers too much responsibility no matter how "efficient" the help of
moving ones and zeroes along is. May be in the case of Asimov's True Love,
the computer may one day feel "sorry" for Milton because he has so few
choices for true love or even smaller yet, infatuation. And in the computer's
pity for Milton, removes him from society as a corrupted file, a virus of
society who "sadly" cannot find a way to find his loving electron or proton
depending his charge at the moment. Argument after argument, the
computer, Joe, in this case will want to calculate whether Milton should love
or if Joe could love better than Milton and remove him. Computers may have
a part in the selection process, but in no means should they say who is or
who is not the right picks. Do computers go out hand in hand on dates with
real souls with real love? One would be inclined to think no. Even in the form
of androids (computers with the emulated body and mind of a human being)
could not determine such a thing. In the end, it is the will of the soul deep
inside the human being that will determine the love, the true love that one
certainly must desire.
True Love by Isaac Asimov
I think that people who work around computers tend to be more like
computers than those who work away from computers. Those who have little
or no experience with computers will have a problem putting anything into a
1's and 0's perspective, conversely, those who do not work with computers
often will have an analog type of translational behavior with things that are
emotionally driven. With this said and applied to the human being, one can
generally say that those who work around computers will use computers
more as a resource than those who do not use computers and this can be
said with everything from fear to love and especially true love. Although true
that the nervous system works on a binary system, one cannot truly rule in
that favor because each cell of the human body may have less or more
feeling depending on the severity of the behavioral impetus into the human
consciousness or even some have proven, into the human subconsciousness.
For instance, a desire to run may depend on the type of animal that a human
being interprets with vision into the brain's synaptic impulses. A pill bug, for
instance, may give no impetus towards the feeling of fear, while a shark in
open waters may immediately give a desire to swim as fast as one can in
direction of a shoreline. Anything in between may lead into a linear form of
behavioral impetus depending on the degree in which the animal in question
is feared. This, then, could be carried over into the other emotions such as
happiness, joy and love for instance. Several degrees of infatuation and
further more in the context of true love, translate into visual queues of
opposite gender attractions which over the course of a linearly mutated
vision from self-perceived attraction, i.e., the physical beauty of a species to
the beholder. Therefore, true love seems to rely on a variety of mental and
visual experience in order for it to be effective. Rob, in a human's conception
of the brain's emotional impetus, cross referenced with a variety of mental
and visual capacities, one will evidently find steps unto several structured
models that a human can stop and interact with as far as love is concerned. It
is when this human can no longer find any other human being "attractive"
that a true love has been discovered. It can also be said, that may be several
true loves can be adapted into one's life and exist in a parallel schema. With
this analogy, we can see that love is not a binary application into the
existence of the intellectual hominid.
The actual notion of the emanation of true love can be said to come from the
injection of emotions from an intelligent life form other than the human
being. It must come from a sentient race of beings that have the capability to
capture their emotions and give it to a sub-intelligent race of beings.
Although this can be said, it can also be said that love and other emotions
could have been incubating in the center of the soul for millions of years
before actively evolving into what we see as love and true love today. It's
interesting that most people say love comes from the heart and although
may be it is possibly what human beings believe is the heart is really the soul
of body, the center of the mind and may be we subconciously pool it from
some source unbeknown to us in a completely different pool of emotions.
To say that love is reactive is like saying sleep is proactive. One will never
know unless we suddenly have an evolutionary compounded mutation geared
for the understanding of emotional impetus. True love is the optimal form of
relational impetus with other beings. I cannot say that it is strictly bound to
sentient beings from Earth for it is quite possibly that one can fall in true love
with sentient minds from other interstellar sources. I tend to think that most
people settle for beings in which they can readily cope in order to procreate
but not necessarily in the light of a situation where true love is present. It
seems that there are no degrees of true love and to be in true love is an all
encompassing situation where a plateau of emotions combine to form.
True Love by Isaac Asimov
How can computers help you with emotions?
The story "True Love" written by Isaac Asimov is about a programmer named Milton
Davidson who built Joe, a computer that has access to the data of every human
being in the world. Joe also talks better than every other computer. Milton wants his
PC to find the perfect woman for him. After collecting enough information about how
Milton wants the girl to be like, Joe eliminates all the women that do not match until
there are 235 left. But because Milton cannot go out with each of them, he brings in
holographs of three beauty contest winners so that Joe can pick out the best
matches. Milton dates each of the final eight, but he does not feel love for any single
one of them. So Milton decides to give Joe more information about himself because
they both agree on that love is a two-way street. After a lot of work Joe finds the
perfect match for Milton, a girl named Charity Jones who works at the Library of
History in Wichita, Kansas. But one day before she arrives, Milton gets arrested for a
crime he committed ten years ago. Because Milton was Joe’s mentor and the
computer has learned all he knows from him and now he just thinks like him. He
believes that Charity is the perfect match for him as well, and that she can be his
true love just like she would have been Milton’s.
"True Love’ is a narration written in the first person. Joe, who is one of two main
characters, describes throughout the whole story how he feels about Milton and his
difficulties to find the right girl. The story starts off in the present tense with Joe
introducing himself. He switches into the past tense when he talks about Milton and
him searching after the right girl. Asimov uses quotations and no reported speech to
show how simple Joe’s mind works. He does not let Joe become an individual. Joe
will always be like his inventor. Asimov tries to show how critical we have to be of
new technology and that machines might take our place one day. If you give a
machine its own mind and you cannot control it anymore, it will turn out to be a
competitor rather than an ally.
The story makes clear how hard it is to find the perfect partner in life. Even if you
find the girl who looks just right, it is always a two-way street. If she does not like
you, there is nothing you can do about it. But would it be bad to own a computer like
Joe, who could find the right partner for you? Maybe the future will bring us
technology that helps us to solve difficult problems like this one. But what about
feelings? Do you not love someone because you made special experiences with him,
because you like even the mistakes he or she has? How can a computer help out
there? After all I do not think it is good to depend that much on a machine. We
already cannot live without them any more. What will happen if they start controlling
our life in every single way? Machines like Joe, which have their own mind, will not
help but control, like in this story where the machine takes over the human role in
the end. And if they are all connected to each other, there are going to act like a
single one. Concluding, I believe it is up to everyone and not a machine to find his or
her right partner. Computers can help us doing our work and communicating with
each other, but not falling in love with someone.