Cold Love: Can screened depictions of love between humans & robots legitimately contribute to debates regarding the socio-ethical implications of huma

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Project title in full:Cold Love: Can screened depictions of love between humans & robots legitimately contribute to debates regarding the socio-ethical implications of human-robot interactions?Summary:With AI and Robotics playing an increasingly intimate role in our lives, their socio-ethical impact is garnering attention across various academic fields. One pertinent area of HRI (Human Robot Interaction) is the potential for love between humans and robots. However, given the speed with which technologies are developing, it is difficult for those disciplines to keep pace. Leading ethicists admit that we now face questions which were previously only the stuff of science fiction (SF). As unpredictable as technologically-influenced social changes often are, given that SF pondering HRI has frequently taken the form of philosophical thought experiments, it follows that we should look directly to SF to help answer these questions.Growing interest in thinking philosophically through film, allied with the medium's technological nature, makes SF cinema an apt resource for the above. Furthermore, film's ability to elicit strong emotional responses whilst also being able to disseminate ideas to the widest audience, allows it to not only reflect but also foster ideas on how society should respond to living with, and potentially loving, machines. Since the first screen kiss in 1896, film has been preoccupied with the reproduction of love; robot film is no exception, with one of the genre's earliest films, Metropolis (Lang, 1927), supplying one of the most indelible robotic meme: the seductive Robot Maria. However, the erotic is not the only modality of HRI on screen. By examining films which explore various forms of love between humans and robots in parallel with developments in AI and robotics, and the theoretical and philosophical debates these have given rise to, I will investigate whether they are a legitimate part of ongoing discussions on love with robots, thereby providing an avenue into the debate which is both useful for academics and accessible to the general public.