„What do looks matter when our personalities will resonate?” (p.50 l.99-101) said Joe, before he is going to meet the woman of his life, his true love. We expect a human being to ask such a question, but Joe is a computer program, who has started to think and identify himself with a human.
This quote is from the end of the short story „True Love“ written in 1977 by Isaac Asimov.
The story was written in a time where computers were a very new invention, also the internet started to exist in this period. At this time some people thought that computers could maybe become dangerous and run wild. In the short story “True love” the author imagines what that could look like.
One of the unusual things in the short story is that the story is told from the point of view of a computer program. The story is told from Joe in the first person and in the retrospective. The story ends with Joe telling what he expects to happen in the future. That the story is told fromJoe´s perspective is surprising. It has the effect that it seems as if Joe was a human, because he thinks the same way and also has a name as we have. Joe tells us the story in a language which isn´t that formal, that lets us have a smaller distance.
Joe, the I-narrator is a computer-program, who can read the data of all persons in the world. He is mean and selfish, but he is good at hiding that. He is an experimental model. „I´m tired of improving you in order to solve the problems of the world“. (p.48 l.30-33) This quote shows what Joe`s task is. He is programmed to solve problems. Joe is a round character because he develops and is complex.
Joe is programmed by the by the best programmer in the world, Milton. Milton is 40 years old , lives alone and wants to find his true love, the perfect girl for him. He is naïve and impatient. Milton is a flat character. He only undergoes little change and isn´t presented with much detail. Both main characters