5 ms·

Emotions are difficult, as they're (probably) as much physiological responses as they are cognitive ones. You could possibly simulate those, but I'd ask why bot

by lutze 14y ago

Emotions are difficult, as they're (probably) as much physiological responses as they are cognitive ones. You could possibly simulate those, but I'd ask why bother? Why would we need AI to be human-like at all? We already have a form of human intelligence, us! It's like the android fixation with robotics... arguably the most useful robots don't look anything like us. The human brain is a good starting point, but in the long run I think the most useful AIs will probably be the ones that DON'T think like us.

georgeorwell 14y ago
Well, one argument is that if you had a human that just didn't feel emotions, you'd have a psychopath. Our capacity for empathy and the ability to share in each other's emotions stops us from doing harmful things that are in our 'rational self interest'. I'm not convinced that I want to live in a world with AI's that are as cognitively powerful as humans but are incapable of feeling emotions because I'm afraid they'd behave like psychopaths. But, you know, maybe you're right, if human safety is somehow factored into things then it could work.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- surrealize 14y ago
  I'm not sure it's right to say that psychopaths are without emotion. I'd call self-interest and self-preservation emotional impulses. People naturally assume that AIs will exhibit those, but that assumption is driven by our experience with existing intelligences, which have all been shaped by natural selection.
  - rytis 14y ago
    And I'm not sure if self-interest and more importantly self-preservation can be seen as emotions. These two are baked in into every live organism even the most primitive ones. And it would be difficult to state that these organisms have emotions. Then again depends on how you define what emotion is.
  - pretoriusB 14y ago
    >I'm not sure it's right to say that psychopaths are without emotion. Well, it's has been shown in several psychological tests, including parts of the brain that show emotion not firing when shown trafic videos, etc.
    - surrealize 14y ago
      The lack of certain emotional responses isn't the same as the lack of all emotion.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
      That's lack of empathy, failure to feel for others. It's not the same thing.
  - surrealize 14y ago
    Or, to restate it closer to what I meant: With respect to an emotionless AI, the term "psychopath" is out of left field. The term "psychopath" is associated with danger because of certain dangerous human psychopaths. And those people had a whole set of motivations and impulses that wouldn't exist in an emotionless AI. If you want to argue that an emotionless AI would be dangerous, go ahead, but the term "psychopath" is a poor fit to that case. It brings in too much extra baggage.
- wildranter 14y ago
  Psychopaths have emotions, they just aren't mature enough to appreciate theM fully. [1] With that out of the way we can talk about emotions. Most of them are simple cognitive responses. For instance, if you see a cute puppy you have at least to smile. At the other end of the spectrum we have the intricate web of woman's emotions. Hard to explan, and almost impossible to even grasp. As no one seems to understand this problem well we could leave it out of the specs for now. [1] http://psychopathyawareness.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/the-psychopaths-emotions-what-does-he-feel/ http://psychopathyawareness.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/the-psy...
  - georgeorwell 14y ago
    Just to clarify, my reasoning was no emotions -> no empathy -> psychopathy. Although I believe psychopathy -> no empathy, I don't believe no empathy -> no emotions.
rck 14y ago
You're right that a lot of the most useful AIs won't (or don't) need to think like humans, but one large class of AIs that will at least need that capability are the ones that have to interact with people in social settings. I'd be surprised if that didn't become common. As for simulating emotion, there's a bit of evidence that such abilities may have therapeutic applications: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/robots-children-autism/story?id=14780741#.ULgc9Xdx0xB http://abcnews.go.com/Health/robots-children-autism/story?id...
- lutze 14y ago
  Ah, but that's not simulating emotion, it's simulating the appearance of emotion. Big difference! If we were going that route, I'd rather an AI actually feel empathy, rather than just being able to look like they do... Because faking it is pretty much textbook psycho! Edit: Just to clarify, when I say AI, I'm referring to strong AI, not anything that we have now (or are even close to getting).
  - sneak 14y ago
    > , but that's not simulating emotion, it's simulating the appearance of emotion. Big difference! Is there, really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
    - dvdhsu 14y ago
      Well, yes. The Chinese Room claims that there is a gulf between being able to pass a Chinese Turing test versus being able to actually understand Chinese and have intentionality. Unlike intentionality, however, emotions aren't just for show: I act differently, depending on my emotions. For example, when I'm angry, I sometimes act irrationally. My actions, therefore, depend on my emotions. To program emotions (anger), and their effects (irrationality) is difficult (how do you program irrationality?). For example, the robot your GP linked to is different from other robots because it has "obvious emotional expressions". These emotional expressions probably don't translate in to different behaviors; when the robot has an angry expression, it's not going to hit the child it's playing with, it's just going to display an angry face. So, yes, there is a difference between ersatz emotions and real emotions. That's why the Chinese Room argument isn't quite a parallel. For the Chinese Room, it's hard to tell whether or not the computer has intentionality just by speaking to it; for an emotional robot which acts, it's easy to tell whether or not it has actual emotions.
haberman 14y ago
> You could possibly simulate [emotions], but I'd ask why bother? I've been thinking about this lately and my working theory is that emotions are a fundamental driver of learning, because they give us pleasure when we accomplish something. A CPU can complete billions of operations per second but doesn't care which ones. Because it experiences no pleasure from doing something useful, it is not at all self-directed; we must tell it exactly what to do. There is nothing to guide it through the search space of all possible things it could be doing. My theory is that a very basic part of artificial intelligence will be missing until a machine exhibits some kind of emotion.
- krashidov 14y ago
  Well, why not use a different reward system. The "emotional" reward system is just an evolutionary mechanism to make sure we eat and have sex. The downside is that it is primitive and open to exploitation. Obviously I'm oversimplifying, but why would an AI try to learn things when it could be emotionally satisfied by playing games, socializing, or taking some sort of drug?
  - haberman 14y ago
    I see it differently; to me the "emotional" reward system is what makes you feel good every time you have an "aha" moment that pushes the boundaries of your knowledge. It is what is exploited by Zynga to make us keep clicking buttons that don't actually accomplish anything. It's what keeps you coding into the night because you thirst to see the system working, and it's what makes you feel like a badass once it does. If you felt like a badass after doing something worthless, like adding a million random numbers, your mental facilities would go to waste. You would spend all of your time and mental energy doing things that don't matter. Our minds are capable of doing an infinite number of useless things, just like a CPU without a program. Only because we get a sense of satisfaction from doing interesting things can we be productive. We're searching an infinite graph for "interesting" nodes, where "interesting" is determined by how good it feels to get there.
nekopa 14y ago
I think that emotions and even more so, ethics, will be important in ways that we don't quite see or understand yet as AI becomes a bigger part of society. I see them as playing an important role in making decisions for autonomous robots, or even embedded ones. The economist has an interesting editorial on the topic: http://www.economist.com/node/21556234 http://www.economist.com/node/21556234
mwill 14y ago
I'm likely way off the mark here, but wouldn't anything with great intelligence and no emotional responses be a sociopath?
- RyanMcGreal 14y ago
  Psychopaths have emotions. What they don't have is empathy, or the ability to mirror and feel other people's emotions.
  - mwill 14y ago
    That's sort of what I was feeling, can you have empathy without a concept of emotion? (Honest question, I have no idea here)
    - RyanMcGreal 14y ago
      Since empathy is feeling someone else's emotions as your own, empathy seems to presuppose emotion.
luser001 14y ago
Pretty good point. Jeff Hawkins makes the same point in his book "On Intelligence", which I highly recommend. https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=on+intelligence+book&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=on+intelligence+book&#...

by lutze 14y ago

georgeorwell 14y ago

Well, one argument is that if you had a human that just didn't feel emotions, you'd have a psychopath. Our capacity for empathy and the ability to share in each other's emotions stops us from doing harmful things that are in our 'rational self interest'. I'm not convinced that I want to live in a world with AI's that are as cognitively powerful as humans but are incapable of feeling emotions because I'm afraid they'd behave like psychopaths. But, you know, maybe you're right, if human safety is somehow factored into things then it could work.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
surrealize 14y ago
I'm not sure it's right to say that psychopaths are without emotion. I'd call self-interest and self-preservation emotional impulses. People naturally assume that AIs will exhibit those, but that assumption is driven by our experience with existing intelligences, which have all been shaped by natural selection.
- rytis 14y ago
  And I'm not sure if self-interest and more importantly self-preservation can be seen as emotions. These two are baked in into every live organism even the most primitive ones. And it would be difficult to state that these organisms have emotions. Then again depends on how you define what emotion is.
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  >I'm not sure it's right to say that psychopaths are without emotion. Well, it's has been shown in several psychological tests, including parts of the brain that show emotion not firing when shown trafic videos, etc.
  - surrealize 14y ago
    The lack of certain emotional responses isn't the same as the lack of all emotion.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
    That's lack of empathy, failure to feel for others. It's not the same thing.
- surrealize 14y ago
  Or, to restate it closer to what I meant: With respect to an emotionless AI, the term "psychopath" is out of left field. The term "psychopath" is associated with danger because of certain dangerous human psychopaths. And those people had a whole set of motivations and impulses that wouldn't exist in an emotionless AI. If you want to argue that an emotionless AI would be dangerous, go ahead, but the term "psychopath" is a poor fit to that case. It brings in too much extra baggage.
wildranter 14y ago
Psychopaths have emotions, they just aren't mature enough to appreciate theM fully. [1] With that out of the way we can talk about emotions. Most of them are simple cognitive responses. For instance, if you see a cute puppy you have at least to smile. At the other end of the spectrum we have the intricate web of woman's emotions. Hard to explan, and almost impossible to even grasp. As no one seems to understand this problem well we could leave it out of the specs for now. [1] http://psychopathyawareness.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/the-psychopaths-emotions-what-does-he-feel/ http://psychopathyawareness.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/the-psy...
- georgeorwell 14y ago
  Just to clarify, my reasoning was no emotions -> no empathy -> psychopathy. Although I believe psychopathy -> no empathy, I don't believe no empathy -> no emotions.

rck 14y ago

You're right that a lot of the most useful AIs won't (or don't) need to think like humans, but one large class of AIs that will at least need that capability are the ones that have to interact with people in social settings. I'd be surprised if that didn't become common. As for simulating emotion, there's a bit of evidence that such abilities may have therapeutic applications: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/robots-children-autism/story?id=14780741#.ULgc9Xdx0xB http://abcnews.go.com/Health/robots-children-autism/story?id...

lutze 14y ago
Ah, but that's not simulating emotion, it's simulating the appearance of emotion. Big difference! If we were going that route, I'd rather an AI actually feel empathy, rather than just being able to look like they do... Because faking it is pretty much textbook psycho! Edit: Just to clarify, when I say AI, I'm referring to strong AI, not anything that we have now (or are even close to getting).
- sneak 14y ago
  > , but that's not simulating emotion, it's simulating the appearance of emotion. Big difference! Is there, really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
  - dvdhsu 14y ago
    Well, yes. The Chinese Room claims that there is a gulf between being able to pass a Chinese Turing test versus being able to actually understand Chinese and have intentionality. Unlike intentionality, however, emotions aren't just for show: I act differently, depending on my emotions. For example, when I'm angry, I sometimes act irrationally. My actions, therefore, depend on my emotions. To program emotions (anger), and their effects (irrationality) is difficult (how do you program irrationality?). For example, the robot your GP linked to is different from other robots because it has "obvious emotional expressions". These emotional expressions probably don't translate in to different behaviors; when the robot has an angry expression, it's not going to hit the child it's playing with, it's just going to display an angry face. So, yes, there is a difference between ersatz emotions and real emotions. That's why the Chinese Room argument isn't quite a parallel. For the Chinese Room, it's hard to tell whether or not the computer has intentionality just by speaking to it; for an emotional robot which acts, it's easy to tell whether or not it has actual emotions.

haberman 14y ago

> You could possibly simulate [emotions], but I'd ask why bother? I've been thinking about this lately and my working theory is that emotions are a fundamental driver of learning, because they give us pleasure when we accomplish something. A CPU can complete billions of operations per second but doesn't care which ones. Because it experiences no pleasure from doing something useful, it is not at all self-directed; we must tell it exactly what to do. There is nothing to guide it through the search space of all possible things it could be doing. My theory is that a very basic part of artificial intelligence will be missing until a machine exhibits some kind of emotion.

krashidov 14y ago
Well, why not use a different reward system. The "emotional" reward system is just an evolutionary mechanism to make sure we eat and have sex. The downside is that it is primitive and open to exploitation. Obviously I'm oversimplifying, but why would an AI try to learn things when it could be emotionally satisfied by playing games, socializing, or taking some sort of drug?
- haberman 14y ago
  I see it differently; to me the "emotional" reward system is what makes you feel good every time you have an "aha" moment that pushes the boundaries of your knowledge. It is what is exploited by Zynga to make us keep clicking buttons that don't actually accomplish anything. It's what keeps you coding into the night because you thirst to see the system working, and it's what makes you feel like a badass once it does. If you felt like a badass after doing something worthless, like adding a million random numbers, your mental facilities would go to waste. You would spend all of your time and mental energy doing things that don't matter. Our minds are capable of doing an infinite number of useless things, just like a CPU without a program. Only because we get a sense of satisfaction from doing interesting things can we be productive. We're searching an infinite graph for "interesting" nodes, where "interesting" is determined by how good it feels to get there.

nekopa 14y ago

I think that emotions and even more so, ethics, will be important in ways that we don't quite see or understand yet as AI becomes a bigger part of society. I see them as playing an important role in making decisions for autonomous robots, or even embedded ones. The economist has an interesting editorial on the topic: http://www.economist.com/node/21556234 http://www.economist.com/node/21556234

mwill 14y ago

I'm likely way off the mark here, but wouldn't anything with great intelligence and no emotional responses be a sociopath?

RyanMcGreal 14y ago
Psychopaths have emotions. What they don't have is empathy, or the ability to mirror and feel other people's emotions.
- mwill 14y ago
  That's sort of what I was feeling, can you have empathy without a concept of emotion? (Honest question, I have no idea here)
  - RyanMcGreal 14y ago
    Since empathy is feeling someone else's emotions as your own, empathy seems to presuppose emotion.

luser001 14y ago

Pretty good point. Jeff Hawkins makes the same point in his book "On Intelligence", which I highly recommend. https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=on+intelligence+book&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=on+intelligence+book&#...