It’s that wonderful frightening narrative humans love and appreciate: A researcher realizes in his conversations with an AI model about the latter being sentient. He freaks out, gets fired/put on…

Is mutual love with a robot possible? And if it is possible, would it make relationships between human beings less desirable? Those are the questions examined by Lily Eva Frank, a philosophy professor at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands who wrote an essay with Sven Nyholm for the new book Robot Sex. We already have sex robots, but the technology is still limited. Eventually, the machines will become sufficiently lifelike that the line between person and robot will be blurred.

Last spring I came to know a pair of pigeons. I'd been putting out neighborly sunflower seeds for them and my local Brooklyn house sparrows; typically I left them undisturbed while feeding, but every so often I'd want to water my plants or lie in the sun. This would scatter the flock--all, that is, except for these two. One, presumably male, was a strapping specimen of pigeonhood, big and crisp-feathered in an amiably martial way. The other, smaller bird presented a stark contrast: head and neck feathers in patchy disarray, eyes watery, exuding a sense of illness that transcends several hundred million years of divergent evolution. She didn't have the energy to take wing as I approached.

The idea seems wonderful - a phone app that allows you to take a photo of a plant or animal and receive immediate species identification and other information about it. A "Shazam for nature" so to speak. We are building huge repositories of data related to our natural environments, making this idea a reality. But there are ethical concerns that should be addressed: about how data is collected and shared, who has the right to share it and how we use public data for machine learning. And there's a bigger concern – whether such apps change what it means to be human.

Love is supposed to make you stupid. We're used to seeing the lover as a mooning fool, blind to his lover's faults and the goings-on of the outside world, or even as a person who has lost all sense of rationality or propriety, driven to a kind of madness. There's science to back this up: Love has been shown to decrease brain activity in areas associated with memory, long-term planning, learning, and abstract thought, and psychologists have found a correlation between love and irrational and obsessive behaviors. However, as with most human emotions, there are two sides to this love story. Being in love can also boost our cognition.

HBO's new sci-fi series "Westworld" hardly seems like the show to feature love and romance, but show creator Lisa Joy said that these two things are actually going to be present throughout the show. "I think it goes back to the notion of romantic love, from the earliest myths, from Pygmalion and Galatea," Joy told the L.A. Times of human guests falling in love with the robotic "hosts" of the theme park. "You fall in love with this inanimate creature that you imbue with all your hopes and dreams. "Oftentimes it's narcissism, because you just want to see yourself in their eyes as something wonderful," she continued. "And that's what a lot of these guests are doing.