Robotic Intimacy In Dominic Pettman's I Love You

To most, the sentence ‘I love you’ is an affectionate statement made between friends, family, and lovers in an effort to create, develop, or maintain intimacy. Alternatively, author Dominic Pettman finds that statement ‘I Love You’ serves to be a “command that executes a programmed set of responses (191). These responses can take many forms, like reciprocation through stating ‘I love you too,’ however Pettman attempts to claims that courtship is more robotic, ritualistic, and predictable. In his article, Pettman argues that many shared cultural rituals around dating and courtship function as a technological treatment of romance, and that similar modern forms undo negative notions of intimacy and identity (189). Similar to the perspective

While the initial test required a person to be able to distinguish between machine and human, Pettman offers an alternative to the test claiming that the distinction between lovable and unlovable is more precedent, rather than human and machine (192). Pettman is not the first to provide alternative Turing Tests, with author Janis Svilpis finding multiple works of science fiction which provide alterations and predate the test which aims to measure intelligence (449). Svilpis concludes that these works of fiction function as a “literature of ideas,” however more importantly, they outline what it means to be human (430). For example, in Isaac Asimov’s short story “Robbie,” the title character’s intelligence is measured based on his sympathy for human life (Amisov 14). Thus, it can be concluded that according to Asimov, sympathy for other human life is a required characteristic in distinguishing human intelligence. In application to Pettman’s alteration to the test, this poses issues as it is evident that human intelligence is shown through someone being “lovable.” However, being lovable is not exclusively a human characteristic, since one can love their dog, their mobile phone, or even a