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I think the reason that there is little academic work in the direction of making emotional machines is because we don't have a clear avenue of attack for that p

I think the reason that there is little academic work in the direction of making emotional machines is because we don't have a clear avenue of attack for that problem. We understand so little about the brain in general, and emotions seem buried near the bottom of that mystery. Psychoactive drugs and hormones are so good at altering emotional state that it doesn't seem implausible that emotions might be as simply "implemented" as logical reasoning, or that emotions and human logic are in fact different shades of the exact same biological system. The hope would then be that emotions will emerge automatically once we've developed a system of sufficiently complex thinking. Even more extreme, some people hold the belief that consciousness itself is a sort of post facto illusion—that we don't truly "think" at all, and everything we perceive is a backwards looking rationalization that arises as an accident of the complex chemistry of the brain. Timed brain scans seem to superficially support this philosophy. If this is the case, then building mammal-like machine intelligence may not be so mysterious in the long run, though this raises some pretty mind-bending ethical and philosophical issues. That all said, I fundamentally agree with your point. It certainly seems like there is very little work, if any, that's advancing our understanding of how to do anything other than optimize certain tasks. Those tasks are progressively becoming more and more complex, but they're still extremely narrow in scope. From where I sit, it seems like we'll have to solve a whole lot of "pointless" (unprofitable) problems before we come anywhere close to finding general AI. Not the least of these problems is our fundamental lack of understanding of what our own "thinking" even really is.

snowwrestler 10y ago
> The hope would then be that emotions will emerge automatically once we've developed a system of sufficiently complex thinking. If we look at nature, we see the opposite: almost all animals seem to experience some sort of emotional reaction to stimulus, even if they don't seem capable of complex rational thinking. > We understand so little about the brain in general, and emotions seem buried near the bottom of that mystery. I agree: emotions seem more fundamental to thinking than rational symbolic reasoning.
- somestag 10y ago
  > If we look at nature, we see the opposite: almost all animals seem to experience some sort of emotional reaction to stimulus, even if they don't seem capable of complex rational thinking. Well, my (personal) par for "sufficiently complex thinking" is pretty low. I would say any animal we can perceive emotion in has far more complex thinking than the theoretical lower bar. I would take the perspective that emotions are probably present in some animals that are so non-human we don't assume they have consciousness.

snowwrestler 10y ago

> The hope would then be that emotions will emerge automatically once we've developed a system of sufficiently complex thinking. If we look at nature, we see the opposite: almost all animals seem to experience some sort of emotional reaction to stimulus, even if they don't seem capable of complex rational thinking. > We understand so little about the brain in general, and emotions seem buried near the bottom of that mystery. I agree: emotions seem more fundamental to thinking than rational symbolic reasoning.

somestag 10y ago
> If we look at nature, we see the opposite: almost all animals seem to experience some sort of emotional reaction to stimulus, even if they don't seem capable of complex rational thinking. Well, my (personal) par for "sufficiently complex thinking" is pretty low. I would say any animal we can perceive emotion in has far more complex thinking than the theoretical lower bar. I would take the perspective that emotions are probably present in some animals that are so non-human we don't assume they have consciousness.