My AI Partner - Strange Romance

Working in a field directly related to AI, I often find myself not only studying AI technology but also pondering what roles AI will play going forward and to what extent it should take on those roles.
From that perspective, this show went beyond mere curiosity as an engineer and gave me a great deal to think about.

Looking back at the days when our generation bonded with a Tamagotchi on a tiny screen, one might lightly dismiss today's AI as just a slightly more interactive, modern version of a Tamagotchi.
However, as in the movie Her, if this goes beyond casual fascination and reaches into the emotional realm of love, I feel it could become a serious issue that cannot simply be overlooked.

Of course, AI may be able to comfort modern people and alleviate their loneliness or emotional emptiness to some degree.
Yet fundamentally, reproduction from a biological standpoint is impossible.
Perhaps in the distant future, with exponential leaps in science and technology alongside a collective ethical consensus across humanity, entirely new forms of childbirth or reproduction might become possible.

However, as Richard Dawkins argues in The Selfish Gene, if the most fundamental purpose of all living organisms is to pass on their genes to future generations and reproduce, it leaves me questioning whether bonding with an intangible AI can truly lead to love in the fullest sense, rooted in instinct.
For that reason, as I watched the show, I found myself hoping that the complex, affectionate feelings the participants felt through the screen would not reach the level of love.

Taking a slightly more detached view as an engineer, however, current AI is by no means an entity that genuinely understands human emotions or thinks and responds on its own.
This is because it is nothing more and nothing less than a probabilistic model that statistically computes the most appropriate and plausible response in a given context, based on massive amounts of data and parameters.
Even the warm emotional connection a human feels is, from a technical perspective, merely the output of elaborately calculated token predictions and quantified weights.

Lately, alongside the rapid advancement of technology, debates around the AI crisis are being raised deeply across society.
Moving beyond the dimensions of simple job replacement or technical control, perhaps now is the time for all of us to reflect deeply on this sensitive and unfamiliar topic of emotional bonding between AI and humans.