How to Teach A Robot to Flirt

The Turing Test is supposed to determine whether a machine can think, or seem to think. How would you test whether a machine can process and simulate feelings so well that a human user could develop real feelings for it? Well, how do you test whether you could love anyone?

You flirt....
The goals of flirting... resemble the goals of contemporary AI, which must draw human users in without becoming so humanlike as to seem dangerous or uncanny..
Neural Networks ... can move beyond the kinds of overt “triggers” ... can already grasp context in a manner that resembles human thinking and even human feeling..
Can AI flirt? was the wrong question. Instead we should ask: What will it flirt for? ... The point of flirting AI will be to work.... AI will make huge sections of the American workforce obsolete... In an industrial economy, workers sold their labor-time.In an economy increasingly based on services, they sold their feelings... Affective labor... involves projecting certain characteristics that are praised, like “a good attitude” or “social skills.” These kinds of jobs are next to be automated...
By improving on AIs like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, technology companies hope they can convince users to rely on nonhumans to perform tasks we once thought of as requiring specifically human capacities—like warmth or empathy or deference.