Artificial Love

As part of my research on ideas of architecture as living machines and artificial life processes, at the library I came across this book "Artificial Love" by Paul Shepheard and I was drawn into its title. I have this thing about titles of books, I always feel curious to know if the content lives up to a good title... unfortunately life is full of good titles and rubbish contents. I also have other obsessions like covers of cd's, and also with navigability of websites....if it doesn't appeal to me visually, I tend to give it a miss or lose focus...but that is another subdivision of my superficial personality…
Besides, "Artificial Love" passed the 1 minute attention span, so I brought it home. It is half fiction half essay. Shepheard's account is fuelled by a noble purpose: to reclaim the machine as a human artifact, relating to human emotion, dreams and purposes. Any machine, however complex, can be seen as a purely human production, and an object of love, existing in an complex network of motivations and relationships. The machine, as Shepheard sees it, is not standing outside, or above or below the phenomenon we call civilisation, but is instead woven into the fabric of human culture: "We make the machines, we are their programs".
This notion is very important to me because I think robots and machines in general lacki that emotional dimension, they are not likeable, and this is one of my main challenges. What are the criteria of empathy between man and machines?