Love vs AI.

Two news this morning, appearing different, but are conjoined in thoughts for me. 

First, former actress Jacelyn Tay and her husband, Brian Wong, are going through a divorce. Jacelyn (43) married in 2010 and they have a seven-year-old son, Zavier. 

She assured fans: “Don’t worry, me and Zavier are fine.” She then posted pictures of Zavier spending time with Brian and a “family photo celebrating her son’s achievements in school.”

Jacelyn did not disclose the reason for the divorce and she said: “I do not think I owe anyone the reason for divorce except to my son. Even if you guys know, you can’t help or change anything for us. Hence, I ask all who truly care for me and Zavier to give us a peaceful Christmas this year.”

Now, let me set this clear, my post this morning has little to do with Jacelyn’s breakup. I wish her, Zavier and Brian well. There is life, brimming, unexplored life, after divorce and I sincerely believe that. 

My post however has to do with another fascinating article written by MIT’s professor Sherry Turkle. It is entitled “In search of AI - Artificial Intimacy.”

I read Jacelyn’s news and thought long and hard about the fragility of human beings, their vulnerability and mortality. 

Seriously, what makes us human? What is it that when we touch someone deeply, say I do at the altar, join hearts and souls with them, we truly experience the fullness of being alive, treasuring every moment of it, and living with such exuberant hope and joy?

And then, when we face breakups, the pain of separation, the longing of a past that is gone forever, or the hurt and sorrow of a lost loved one, what is it that caused us to experience a brokenness that is beyond words as if our soul is torn apart and our world comes crashing down?

The common thread that runs through all that, the highs and the lows, the joys and sorrows, is the humanness in us. And that is as authentic as it gets to being human, created to experience emotions most times beyond us, and they are there to bring us to a higher level of resilience, maturity, growth and wisdom.

This is where a school administrator Akihiko Kondo comes in. Recently, he married the perfect soul mate. It is a singing hologram, a virtual reality bride named Hatsune Miku. 

Miku will be the perfect bride for Akihiko because she is very much his own creation or programmed with no free will of her own. She will be a bride that satisfies everything she is programmed to satisfy and I trust Akihiko will be happy, or virtually happy for the remainder of his unusual marital union with Miku. 

Ok, I am being sarcastic but here’s my point, and it is captured in this short narration by Professor Turkle. 

In her article, she wrote that “years ago, (she) spoke with a 16-year-old girl who was considering the idea of having a computer companion in the future.”

She said: “There are people who have tried to make friends, but stumbled so badly that they’ve given up. So when they hear this idea of robots as companions, well...it’s not like robot has the mind to walk away or leave you or anything like that.”

Yes, that is true. Your robot bride will never leave you. And if you feel uninspired by her response to you when you return from work jaded and disillusioned, you can tweak her up, dial up the algorithm, and get her to say things in a philosophically comforting manner just to lift up your spirit. 

Mind you, you know your flesh and blood spouse can never do that. Most times, you have to be her “virtual husband” and bear with her shenanigans and temper flares without the consolation or defence of an algorithmic pacifier. 

But here is the catch. Professor Turkle wrote: “These robots can perform empathy in a conversation about your friend, your mother, your child or your lover, but they have no experience of any of these relationships.”

She added: “Mahcines have not known the arc of a human life. They feel nothing of the human loss or love we describe to them. Their conversations about life occupy the realm of the “as if”.”

So there is a trade off. 

Robots are “not capable of love, but they won’t break your heart.” Your marriage vows would not be “for better or for worse” but “for better or for even better” because robots rarely disappoint like a human bride or bridegroom often do. How’s that for a trade-off? Are we ready for that?

Professor Turkle said: “To build the robots, we must first rebuild ourselves as people ready to be their companions.” 

Will we then forget about being human, what it takes, how it feels like together with the pain, the joy, the overcoming, the hope and growth?

The fear is that by programming a robot to “love”, to be empathic, we may also see a corresponding change in ourselves to become less human, and more, well, robot-like. 

Soon, we may just share the same programmable traits of a robot to enjoy what is virtual but never really real like virtual intimacy, virtual joy, virtual pleasures, and so on. 

Professor Turkle puts it this way: -

“We diminish as the seeming empathy of the machine increases. It is technology forcing us to forget what we know about life. In life, you are struck by the importance of presence, of the small moments of meaning, the miracle of your child’s breath, the feelings of deep human connection. When you are thinking about technology, your mind is not on all of that. We programme machines to appear more empathic. Being human today is about the struggle to remain genuinely empathic ourselves. To remember why it matters, to remember what we cherish. These days, to be human is to keep one’s mind on the glory that one is.”

Let me end by telling you how my human heart healed. I have written this before in my blog. 

I met a girl when I was twenty one. She came to me young at 16. Still innocent and beautiful, with hair that touched her tailbone, I fell head over heels for her. 

We courted and enjoyed the best moments that love in a young couple can ever enjoy. Then, when I returned from overseas, I realised her heart had changed somewhat. She was more distracted, more distant with reservation I never knew before.

Then, one day, I followed her and she was with another guy, her colleague. They were going into the movies. I confronted her, begged her not to go inside. She couldn’t say a word and walked away with him. 

My heart shattered into pieces that evening, and as I write this, I can still feel the pain in my throat. That pain seared into my heart, and I had never felt as lonely and vulnerable since that day. 

Yet, this bleeding heart never gave up. After tears that nearly drowned my soul, I picked myself up and pursued her. We married not long after that, and where love was once seemed as a curse, we turned it into a blessing.

18 years and three kids later, we are still together. Yes, we have our differences, but the difference is that we aim to resolve them to advance the relationship, not neglect or abandon it. 

My point is that you can never program that kind of history into one unfeeling, binary machine or companion. 

You can create the most impressive algorithm to roll out conversations that generate empathy, but she or he can never trace the varied, unplanned emotions from day one that breaks one’s heart, heals it along the way and strengthens it with every devotional expression beyond the programmable algorithms. 

Truly, you can never experience love without the risk of having your heart broken. Because love is never about sealing your heart from hurts and disappointments, but it is about exposing it to someone you cannot live without, going the distance with him or her, finding that your heart can be broken, but also finding the strength to overcome that, and grow together so that the journey is not one-dimensional, but multifaceted, not mechanical but dynamic, fully engaged and alive, and most importantly, it is about being human, being vulnerable, and not a programmable robot created by you to please you. Cheerz.

A doomed marriage.

Some marriages bloom while others are doomed.

In a recent judgment, HC Judge Choo made this candid observation: "With perfect lens of hindsight it is obvious that this marriage was doomed 16 years ago."

This marriage is the unfortunate union of a doctor and his clinic assistant wife. The facts are quite depressing.

ROM in March 1990. Three children born out of this union with the eldest now 23 yrs old. Everything spiraled down south in 2001, just 11 yrs after ROM.

Here is what's doomed about it. The wife filed for three divorces in 2001 (dismissed in 2005 after a full trial), in 2010 (dismissed subsequently when contested) and in 2015 (which went for another full trial), and came before Judge Choo in an appeal.

Legal technicalities aside, the union was a harvest of woes since 2001. And Judge Choo even waxed lyrical in his judgment comparing it to a parallel event in history: "Three wars were fought the day after Carthage and Rome realized that they could not live together side by side. The Punic Wars as they are known lasted more than a century from 261 BCE."

Here is what the husband alleged transpired between them in a marital Wars of the Roses.

Since 2001, the husband was charged in court on three separate occasions because his wife complained to the CPF that he did not pay her CPF contributions (while working as his nurse), that he sold medicine illegally, and that he bribed two patient to testify for him. However, the husband was also acquitted on all three occasions! Long story short, his wife's complaint did not hold water in court.

But that's not all. The wife also complained to MOH and HSA about some illegally imported medicine from Malaysia. When MOH and HSA raided the clinic, they found nothing. The wife also complained to MOE on various occasions about her husband's bubble tea business and he had to close his bubble tea shop.

She further lodged a police report about her husband forging her signature to cash a cheque, but no action was taken against the husband (as it turned out, it was in fact her own signature). In 2003, the wife also applied for an injunction to freeze his bank account, applied for enforcement of her maintenance, and garnished his bank for failing to pay her costs for a maintenance appeal.

If you think that's the end of the so called Punic Wars between them, think again. Here are further allegations by the husband.

His wife reported to the police about child abuse committed by the husband. But the investigation found no cause. In Jan 2006, the wife "had beaten one of the children so badly the child had to be treated in a hospital, but the husband pleaded with the police not to prosecute the wife."

And in July 2015, she returned home to find the gate locked. Her attempts to force open the gate agitated the family's two Rottweiler dogs "and when one of their children (then aged 7) ran out on hearing the wife's shouting, the dogs attacked the child so severely that the child's ear was bitten off."

Of course, the wife had her side of her story, but the appeal Judge noted that "in brief, the underlying facts were not denied." In fact, the wife appeared to be in denial when she said that the children are not against her. The trial judge however noted that "one of the children was found by the school counselor to be "suicidal and murderous"".

It further reports that "the husband explained that the child in question wanted to return home to kill the mother (the wife)." It is therefore not surprising that all three children testified in favor of their father against their mother.

Yet after all that, the husband asserts that they still slept together, "had dinners and walks together, and had activities with the children together."

In the end, the husband got his divorce, but on the revised ground of the wife's desertion of the family and not on his allegation of her unreasonable behavior (mainly because those alleged events happened decades ago and he, strange as it might be, still attempted reconciliation with her).

Lesson? Make no mistakes, your greatest fortune or misfortune is your spouse. He or she can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven. And if hell has no fury like a woman scorned, then heaven has no place in a marriage torn.

While the marriage vows reminded us that it is for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part, in reality, at least for some reality, emotional death as manifested in endless bitterness, recriminations and revenge comes early for some hapless couple.

Alas, a marriage can only take so much before the emotional bough breaks and the cradle of marital bliss falls.

Frankly, I have no illusions about marriage. A match may be stitched in heaven during the wedding night, but it can turn into a nightmare after the froth in the champagne glass settles.

Who are we kidding? The divorce rates are rising and some modern marriages are like a canary in the coal mine. All it takes is a whiff of one or two disappointments, expectation falling short or a better alternative looming around to knock the poor songbird off the perch.

Honestly, I do not know of the secret to a long marriage. But I am quite sure about the cause of a short one, and it is in a heart that has no room for anyone else except oneself.

When we see everything only through the prism of self, our world gets smaller, our understanding narrows and our heart waxes cold. Somehow, nothing else matters except how we feel about it. Soon, the measure of all happiness depends on what makes us happy. We become self-referential, self-absorbed.

With the obsession of self comes the destruction of everything else - including a union that is supposedly destined to merge two imperfect lives into one unified whole.

Let me end here. Judge Choo wrote that even the Punic wars ended after the third war. I wish the couple in the above case well. I hope for them peace henceforth. God knows they and their children have gone through a lot. It is indeed time for healing for a union that has sadly gone their separate ways long before this court case. Cheerz.