The rejection case could be solved by making it such that people reciprocate love once someone has fallen in love with them, maybe even changing orientations to do so; I don’t really like this one.
A more elegant solution if you’re going to be messing around with love, and modifying the whole courting element would be to have person 1 not fall in love unless person 2 was also in position to fall in love.
ie. when your system detects that a person is falling for someone, it deletes that, but keeps the fact on record. If the second person reciprocates, they’re both allowed to experience love.
In such a world you could also help solve the heartbreak problem through the same means, once one of the two falls out of love, they both do.
That was more or less precisely the thought going through my mind when I was imagining how I would design the system if I was doing it from scratch. Though not with the “mark and delete” part, just “check to see if love is reciprocable before allowing process to proceed”.
check to see if love is reciprocable before allowing process to proceed”.
Does this mean extrapolating how person 2 will feel after they spend more time with person 1? Would you take into account the presence of a third person who might steal the affections of person 2? I guess we could solve love triangles by duplicating people.
Love also doesn’t seem to me like a binary event, we’d want to allow relationships that would progress to any level on a mutual love spectrum and then stop people from falling deeper in love when their partner would not follow.
Here and elsewhere, I don’t really see the “don’t let things get too bad” solution as categorically separable from just bloody optimizing the process already.
E.g., sure, a generate-and-test mechanism like you propose for relationships is an improvement over the existing no-test version; agreed. But I see it as a step along the way to a more fully optimized system… for example, one where the people most likely to construct mutually satisfying relationships (which include reciprocal-love arrangements, if that’s what you’re into) are proactively introduced to one another.
IMO this solution has a good chance of making the modern world worse—it makes impossible many happy families where one partner stays due to love and the other is okay with that for other reasons.
I’m a bit surprised to see this topic being discussed here, but since it is, I’d like to mention a movie I saw recently (NetFlix streaming) that explored some of the complications that might arise.
A more elegant solution if you’re going to be messing around with love, and modifying the whole courting element would be to have person 1 not fall in love unless person 2 was also in position to fall in love.
ie. when your system detects that a person is falling for someone, it deletes that, but keeps the fact on record. If the second person reciprocates, they’re both allowed to experience love.
In such a world you could also help solve the heartbreak problem through the same means, once one of the two falls out of love, they both do.
That was more or less precisely the thought going through my mind when I was imagining how I would design the system if I was doing it from scratch. Though not with the “mark and delete” part, just “check to see if love is reciprocable before allowing process to proceed”.
Does this mean extrapolating how person 2 will feel after they spend more time with person 1? Would you take into account the presence of a third person who might steal the affections of person 2? I guess we could solve love triangles by duplicating people.
Love also doesn’t seem to me like a binary event, we’d want to allow relationships that would progress to any level on a mutual love spectrum and then stop people from falling deeper in love when their partner would not follow.
Here and elsewhere, I don’t really see the “don’t let things get too bad” solution as categorically separable from just bloody optimizing the process already.
E.g., sure, a generate-and-test mechanism like you propose for relationships is an improvement over the existing no-test version; agreed. But I see it as a step along the way to a more fully optimized system… for example, one where the people most likely to construct mutually satisfying relationships (which include reciprocal-love arrangements, if that’s what you’re into) are proactively introduced to one another.
IMO this solution has a good chance of making the modern world worse—it makes impossible many happy families where one partner stays due to love and the other is okay with that for other reasons.
I’m a bit surprised to see this topic being discussed here, but since it is, I’d like to mention a movie I saw recently (NetFlix streaming) that explored some of the complications that might arise.