True Love by Isaac Asimov

Summary: True Love is about a computer scientist that "understands more about computers than anyone in the world" creates an
experimental computer he calls Joe. Milton Davidson, the scientist, decides that he has put a lot of work into making computers that
help other people but they never help him. As a result Milton decides he will use Joe to find his perfect woman and true love.
Characters:
Milton Davidson - A computer scientist / Programmer that is the best in his field; Looking for true love
Joe - An advanced computer that can speak / is capable of learning ; is being used to find true love for Milton.
Section One:

Milton "understands more about computers than anyone in the world" creates and experimental computer

Milton calls the computer Joe; Milton teaches the computer to speak based after the way the human brain works

Milton decides to use Joe for his personal use of finding a perfect girl for himself, and ultimately true love

Milton has Joe eliminate matches by specific criteria like IQ and height; out of the entire world 235 are still available

Milton knows he cannot interview 235 women so he brings in pictures of models he likes and has Joe look for similar
characteristics in the women; 8 are a match

Milton has Joe illegally transfer the women to work with him one at a time, he decides none of them are his ideal match, or true
love; Joe says its because Milton is not their ideal match

Milton decides he must also be the ideal for the women and looks are not the important factor; Milton has Joe learn everything

about himself, and then illegally set up the remaining 227 women from the original list for psychiatric evaluations

Joe is constantly growing becoming more and more like Milton as Milton "adjust you(Joe) to match me better and better. You
(Joe) get to think more like me, so you understand me better" ; This is done so Joe will be able to find a better true love match
for Milton

Joe states that he and Milton are thinking almost identical now, even his speech has become like Miltons

Joe finds Milton's perfect match; Joe has Milton taken to jail for an illegal action he did ten years ago'

Joe plans on telling the perfect match he loves her; "what do looks matter when our personalities will resonate?"

OTHER NOTES:

Joe has been given special abilities like transfering people by Milton; This allows Joe to break rules that are programmed into
himself

Milton thinks true love is abstract, maybe Isaac Asimov felt the same way.

Milton's first attempts at finding the ideal girl fail because they were not based on personality

2009 copyright www.notes4free.com True Love | Isaac Asimov

Comments
Rob Gripentog - Oct 15, 2009 10:05 AM
Society is on a path of technological domination, technology being the main contributor to many aspects of life. In the story True Love by Isaac Asimov, we are lead into a society that is in control of people through
technology and what could happen if it goes beyond its assigned powers. The resemblance to contemporary society is acute as Asimov shows the growing trend of technological advancement could have negative
implications. Asimov creates an instance of computer revelation in a very short time and although the possibility of such an occurrence happening is low, using the story as an intellectual model allows the reader to

contemplate two aspects. The first aspect of the story is regarding the use of technology both positively and negatively in our society now and in the future. The next aspect is in regards to our own personal view of true
love, and whether or not a computer could have an emotion that we as a society usually regard as our most precious emotion.
Technology has both positive and negative in our society is prominent today. Some of the positive aspects include the ability to house all the books of the entire world on a single computer, forecast weather to protect
people from storms or have better crops, or even give us pleasure of entertainment. However, it is also just as easy to find technology being used negatively and just one word is needed to start an onslaught of those
negatives, war. So, Asimov is obviously aware of both the good and the bad uses of technology but in True Love he is not trying to persuade the reader to choose whether it is important to go against of for technology.
Asimov is instead acting as an informant to the masses that do not understand all of the implications to the future as our technology evolves. Asimov shows ultimately the evils or other negatives that occur are in
actuality a direct result of a human being. In True Love, Joe the computer, starts off as nothing special but a tool. Joe does not have understanding, or the ability to reason on his own in the beginning of the story. While
it may appear that Joe is special because he can speak, it is not until Milton decides to give Joe the ability to break rules does Joe portray human like actions. Ultimately a computer is still bound by the rules we as
humans give them and Milton decided to give Joe the ability to break any of those rules. The difference between humans and computers at this point in the story is negligible, however there is a main difference the
story does not talk about and that is societal pressure or morals. The computer does not have morals and it is easy to see what happens when a person has anti-social behavior, they tend to be the criminals. In True Love
it seems Joe is almost Milton's child in development but Asimov displays the ease a computer can break a human bond when Joe sends Milton to jail in attempts to keep the woman they found for himself. While it may
seem that Joe is not necessarily a negative advancement in technology, I argue that he is because it is no longer a computer that can be used for the tool it was intended to be used as and could eventually develop into
something more sinister than we can imagine. These are the reasons we as a society must balance technological achievements between the positives and negatives as eventually one of the negatives could become a
dominant force.
While True Love hits upon the technological age having some severe implications to humanity's well being, it also brings another thought to the reader's mind. Will a computer have the ability to have emotions like
True Love and if so what are those emotions to humans.
Mike Cunanan - Oct 16, 2009 9:41 PM
True Love is supposed to be unconditional but in this story the true love that Milton sees before him is not only conditional but the conditions themselves were determined by Joe the computer. Milton's interaction with
Joe, however, is unconditional. May be Asimov was trying to tell us that we all have unconditional love and even true love with our computers. Can one imagine all of the love delta's that process in the brain of the
CPU that was Joe's heart. Milton's request of Joe is can only be one of 1's and 0's even as realistic as Joe can seem to be Milton's human counterpart. It can only be that true love exists in a genuine human interaction
with real cells and actual syntax flowing through a synapse of the mind. Is this why only so few "people" could be drawn up from the calculations, because that's all that the responses from Joe could be, that were
supposedly women? Women aren't binary items to be collected bit by bit to be determined feasible to a relationship by a network of transistors and wires. What makes this machine better than any other machine? I
think one is just as well to ask a calculator what things we should eat or who we should date. It's come to the point where computers do tell us the best thing to do. Our minds are irreplaceable, especially when it should
be used as the only tool to love. Joe didn't even have restrictions in code and Milton allowed "him" to go find the right woman for him. How can a computer like Joe tell a living, breathing human being who to love.
Even with today's virtual environments and personal simulators and simulations, computers are only bits and pieces of electronic pulses that should not be used to tell us what to do but should only help us see
information. There are a lot of people out there who base love on a number on a web page. It doesn't matter how many "categories" there are, love is analog, not digital. There is a chance that one day that a computer
may emulate life so well that the computer itself may want the woman for itself and become the "super user" of itself and remove the user, in this case Milton, from the universe. It may learn to remove the user, but will
it know that what it is doing is wrong? Would it know the difference to not do so? Would it know the difference between love and hate, right and wrong or life and death? I think that society may be on a dangerous path
of giving computers too much responsibility no matter how "efficient" the help of moving ones and zeroes along is. May be in the case of Asimov's True Love, the computer may one day feel "sorry" for Milton because
he has so few choices for true love or even smaller yet, infatuation. And in the computer's pity for Milton, removes him from society as a corrupted file, a virus of society who "sadly" cannot find a way to find his
loving electron or proton depending his charge at the moment. Argument after argument, the computer, Joe, in this case will want to calculate whether Milton should love or if Joe could love better than Milton and
remove him. Computers may have a part in the selection process, but in no means should they say who is or who is not the right picks. Do computers go out hand in hand on dates with real souls with real love? One
would be inclined to think no. Even in the form of androids (computers with the emulated body and mind of a human being) could not determine such a thing. In the end, it is the will of the soul deep inside the human
being that will determine the love, the true love that one certainly must desire.
Rob Gripentog - Oct 19, 2009 10:30 AM

Hey Mike, I was wondering what you thought about people being almost exactly like a computer? Already it seems that the nervous system operates solely in binary in terms of off and on signals. Where do you think
emotions like true love emanate from? Are emotions a response driven action or is the emotion a stimulus that allows the person verify what reaction should be made in a particular situation? I'm under the impression
that emotions like fear are a reaction, can true love fall into the same category in your opinion?
Mike Cunanan - Oct 19, 2009 3:51 PM
Rob, I think that people who work around computers tend to be more like computers than those who work away from computers. Those who have little or no experience with computers will have a problem putting
anything into a 1's and 0's perspective, conversely, those who do not work with computers often will have an analog type of translational behavior with things that are emotionally driven. With this said and applied to
the human being, one can generally say that those who work around computers will use computers more as a resource than those who do not use computers and this can be said with everything from fear to love and
especially true love. Although true that the nervous system works on a binary system, one cannot truly rule in that favor because each cell of the human body may have less or more feeling depending on the severity of
the behavioral impetus into the human consciousness or even some have proven, into the human subconsciousness. For instance, a desire to run may depend on the type of animal that a human being interprets with
vision into the brain's synaptic impulses. A pill bug, for instance, may give no impetus towards the feeling of fear, while a shark in open waters may immediately give a desire to swim as fast as one can in direction of a
shoreline. Anything in between may lead into a linear form of behavioral impetus depending on the degree in which the animal in question is feared. This, then, could be carried over into the other emotions such as
happiness, joy and love for instance. Several degrees of infatuation and further more in the context of true love, translate into visual queues of opposite gender attractions which over the course of a linearly mutated
vision from self-perceived attraction, i.e., the physical beauty of a species to the beholder. Therefore, true love seems to rely on a variety of mental and visual experience in order for it to be effective. Rob, in a human's
conception of the brain's emotional impetus, cross referenced with a variety of mental and visual capacities, one will evidently find steps unto several structured models that a human can stop and interact with as far as
love is concerned. It is when this human can no longer find any other human being "attractive" that a true love has been discovered. It can also be said, that may be several true loves can be adapted into one's life and
exist in a parallel schema. With this analogy, we can see that love is not a binary application into the existence of the intellectual hominid.
The actual notion of the emanation of true love can be said to come from the injection of emotions from an intelligent life form other than the human being. It must come from a sentient race of beings that have the
capability to capture their emotions and give it to a sub-intelligent race of beings. Although this can be said, it can also be said that love and other emotions could have been incubating in the center of the soul for
millions of years before actively evolving into what we see as love and true love today. It's interesting that most people say love comes from the heart and although may be it is possibly what human beings believe is
the heart is really the soul of body, the center of the mind and may be we subconciously pool it from some source unbeknown to us in a completely different pool of emotions.
To say that love is reactive is like saying sleep is proactive. One will never know unless we suddenly have an evolutionary compounded mutation geared for the understanding of emotional impetus. True love is the
optimal form of relational impetus with other beings. I cannot say that it is strictly bound to sentient beings from Earth for it is quite possibly that one can fall in true love with sentient minds from other interstellar
sources. I tend to think that most people settle for beings in which they can readily cope in order to procreate but not necessarily in the light of a situation where true love is present. It seems that there are no degrees of
true love and to be in true love is an all encompassing situation where a plateau of emotions combine to form.
Mike Cunanan - Oct 20, 2009 10:59 AM
Rob, when we're introduced to true love, is it possible that we are being introduced to the true love of a prehistoric entity? Are we the witnesses of true love from some prehistoric hour? Could a cave dweller from the
times when we roamed near dinosaurs experience true love as we know true love today? Is true love learned or is the knowledge of true love inherited from our ancestors?
Rob Gripentog - Oct 21, 2009 8:34 AM
Mike, while I have not thought of true love as being an emotion that has been passed on from our ancestors before I do think there is a possibility. Here is my thought process:
Love is one of the most powerful emotions we can have, true love possibly being even stronger, however there is another emotion which rivals its potency; Fear. So, let us take the idea that fear could be passed down
from generation to generation as a means of protection to us, IE: we get afraid because there is a potential for harm. While I have not heard of any particular study for the previous thought, there seems to be a high
potentiality for it. A genetic example of our genes changing to help protect us would be our taste buds, in general if something taste bitter for example, it could make us sick so our bodies have passed that on to
generation after generation. This idea brings me back to fear because fear is something people will have in some situations without any apparent reason to be afraid. The dark is a perfect example of something many
people are afraid of, most likely no one in today's society has truly had something attack them from the dark but are afraid of it anyway. There are many arguments as to being afraid of the dark instead of genetics but I

think genes cannot be ruled out as a possibility. So, why then would true love be something that could not be passed on from our early ancestors. Love would be one of the most powerful ways of keeping our species
alive. Love would cause us to be a little hungry and share our food so multiple people could live. True love would make people brave in the face of danger instead of fleeing for their own safety. True love could even
keep people bonded together for survival instead of the aspect of survival itself.
Of course the flip side to all of this genes stuff is that true love is an aspect of nurture. The moment our mothers put us in her arms we have begun the journey of learning what love is. Mom says she would walk
through a burning fire for us because of true love. Mom, says she would take any pain from us into herself if she could, because of love. Some even argue the only true love is a mother's love. Maybe as a species we
define true love as that which we get from our mothers, and we attempt to duplicate the acts we perceive from her at first. Then as we grow we start to form other images of love, true love becomes more of a general
feeling and is not something that can truly be described because words cannot capture its significance. We attempt to put down into words what love means to us, we try to state the crazy acts of true love because it fills
us to the brim overflowing. A vessel that carries a gallon of water would never be able to describe the vastness of the ocean. Maybe we are vessels of love, we can understand it but description is truly beyond our
ability. Are we empty vessels of love when we are born, only to be filled through learned behaviors? I am inclined to think no, we enter this world understanding love to its fullest potential and it is only the acts of
others when we are young and impressionable that can change our ideas of what true love actually is.
Mike Cunanan - Oct 21, 2009 3:31 PM
Rob, mothers do provide the growing internal sentient being growing within her body with a true love. From hour to hour and day to day the love within the mother is a form of the true love that only mothers on this
planet can bring. Mothers are the vessel of true love for their growing children, both during child bearing and during child rearing. The mother and the mother's DNA in my opinion is committed to bringing on the true
love necessary to raise children. True love in this context revolves around the vessel of love that is the mother. DNA comes from a long line of generations so it just may be possible that some deep and successfully
carried on versions of love may exist in a form that is not very different from the ancient versions. True love is a permanent corner stone of the human being's existence. True love will be found in many contexts which
includes a certain true love in a motherly way to the true love that human beings will have for each other in a non-motherly sense. When one experiences true love, it is a cultivation of generations of love arising from
the horizon of the existence of humanity. It is safe to say that the human race is constantly evolving in physical, mental and spiritual ways in regards to true love. True love must come from a genuine feeling from
inside.
Rob Gripentog - Nov 24, 2009 9:23 AM
True Love by Isaac Asimov
So, recently I read the short story True Love by Isaac Asimov. I just wanted to write a quick post regarding it because I enjoy most of Asimov's stories and this is no exception. True Love is about a man named Milton
Davis, he is a computer programmer in the future. Milton is a man that has been unlucky when it comes to true love and as a result he has decided he will use his prototype computer Joe to help him. Milton has created
Joe to have the ability to speak, and it is stated that Joe has the ability because he has been programmed based off of the human brain. This is the first step in the process of making a machine act more like humans, and
giving it personality. Isaac Asimov has set up the rest of the story through foreshadowing to show a computer could possibly one day have the same actions as a person. Continuing on in the story Asimov continues to
break down the rules of the computer system that Milton is using. The first example of the rule breakdown happened when Davis decided he wanted to meet the women that were narrowed down by the search he
performed. Davis knows the best way to meet the women would be to have them work with him, so he programs Joe to have the ability to break one of the rules of the univac (the computer system of the world). Again,
we can see the progression of more human like behaviors of Joe in True Love because he now has the ability to break the rules.
I will be discussing the story in the future, but if you want to go check out a summary of True Love you can. So, go read the story or at least look at the summary because it is great.
Related Topics: True Love By Isaac Asimov
Posted by rohb at 12:15 PM
1 comments:
Stray Katt said...
Commercialism of love is a relational element that should be disregarded as being necessary in one's quest for true love. To be in true love, an intrinsic value alone should be enough to gain the experience with another
person. This is not to say that gifts should not be accepted but it should be said that the intrinsic value should be the core structure that a relationship of this magnitude should have. Infatuation should not be a matter of
convenience, therefore, a true love can never just be a passion of convenience for in order for one to be in an environment of true love one must have the informational code that incorporates that space. One must pay

attention to the versions of love that may negatively associate one's perceptions of specifications that implement love in many ways and avoid that negativity. To "score points" in the direction of true love, one must
positively look at the standards which move one up across the board. In order to fully appreciate this hands on experience of the environment should be tried out.
Rob Gripentog - Nov 24, 2009 9:23 AM
Continuing my discussion of True Love By Isaac Asimov
The story of true love coming from the point of view of Isaac Asimov is definitely a unique one. Set in some indeterminate time in the future, Asimov develops quickly our view of the current events. The future is seen
through the eyes of one man, but only in glimpses, his name is Milton Davidson. The feel I get when reading the story about Milton is the future is not much more advanced than our current society. I have come to this
conclusion based off of the performance abilities of computers in the story, they are extremely important in everyday life and probably have a certain amount of artificial intelligence. However, computers in True Love
are on the verge of human potential as we can tell from the Joe. Isaac Asimov has created the computer, Joe, that has the ability to talk. However it is interesting to note that Asimov states the computer has learned to
talk based after his creator. We can easily see where Asimov is heading in True Love with his reference to a computer that has started off learning human abilities by mimicking the human though process.
More on this topic in the future, for now I gotta run.
Rob Gripentog - Nov 24, 2009 9:24 AM
Its me again looking at true love from another point of view, the computer. Assuming we had a computer that would base true love after something, what on earth would that something be? Judging from True Love by
Isaac Asimov it appears he has already given this some thought. Computers are machines that must put everything in the terms of 1's and 0's , so how would they categorize true love? We can start of with a bases from
Asimov and assume that a computer would probably first categorize looks and other physical appeals, such as intellect. In this instance we can think of intellect as a physical form because Isaac Asimov is referencing
the IQ which is based mostly off of ones general knowledge. So a computer would potentially put the physical symmetry of the body as well as the overall IQ into two categories to check. Personally I think attempting
to categorize True Love is inherently going to end in failure, however we must look at it from the computers perspective in order to take away some of its allusiveness.
On a side note, I think an over intellectual thought process involving True Love could potentially cause disaster in a relationship because people might actual hit upon some of the reasons they were attracted to each
other in the first place and confuse themselves into second guessing their relationship. Sometimes we just need to be happy that people are people and that True Love is not always going to be a direct correlation to that
happiness we initially feel.
Anyway, back on point the basic analysis here is this: When intellectualizing True Love we are forced to categorize it like a computer.
Rob Gripentog - Nov 24, 2009 9:24 AM
True Love is digital! If something can be represented in ones and zeros, then it must be by default a digital representation. So what is true love? Maybe what we are looking
at can be quantified and maybe not, maybe the simple act of quantifying something as miraculous as love can be considered wrong. In the story True Love, Asimov attempts
to use Milton's brain to figure out what true love would be. The question is, should we be attempting to put an emotion into a defined boundary. A good example of this is a
few of my ex-girlfriends, they could be considered analytical and often questioned what love actually entails. These girls, and to be fair it was really one in particular
continually asked what love is. However, I have to ask, are you defining love as actions that occur or are you going for a feeling that you have. If it's an action, then I believe
love will have a wide range of definitions. One person may see love as being the act of giving something tangible or taking care of someone through physical means.
Implications for believing love is directly linked to something physical are abundant. A good example of a negative to believing such a thing is the inability to give something
of worth. Often times when objects are given as the sole love interest, then the worth of the object will have a direct correlation to the amount the giver has for the receiver
(in the receiver's mind). Obviously this can cause huge problems for people that have a money issue, but beyond that the giver may not even know the person he/she loves
is looking at the present in such a way. To the giver it could very well represent nothing other than it is nice to give, and the receiver will enjoy it. I know a lot of people are
probably in a fit of argument-al outbreaks, however wait a moment and hear me out. All I'm really trying to say is true love is not something that