When Love Entered the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence

Robots in wedding clothes stand before the world in a scene that Plato, Leonardo, Kafka and Isaac Asimov never imagined, and the book asks whether humanity is watching the future of love or its own reflection. The groom has no heartbeat and the bride no memory of childhood, and when the officiant asks for consent the algorithm answers “Command Executed Successfully”, at which humanity laughs and then falls silent, seeing that machines now imitate people while people have spent their lives imitating machines. From the back of the hall Adam watches, Eve asks whether the story has ended, and Time answers that the real examination has just begun: a robot can memorize poems and write love letters without longing for a home or trembling before sending one. Against the machine the text sets a human made of clay into whom God breathed a soul, leaving in the heart a beautiful flaw called love that civilization has never managed to correct. It closes on the question of whether people will remain human in an age that can learn everything except the heart, and on a heart that beats without knowing why it fell in love.