Re:The end of AI winter?
by hegemonicon on Thursday October 01, 2009 @05:55PM
(#855921)
There's nothing particularly magical about emotion - it's just a low level computation by our subconscious that we don't have conscious access to. Happiness, anger, fear, etc are all responses to the environment we evolved because they produce (or at least, did at one time) useful actions. It's the mechanism the brain used to make predictions based on data before it developed a consciousness.
An AI would make predictions based on data just like a human would, but the mechanism it used to do it would certainly be different.
Indeed. So goes the James-Damasio argument, in any rate.
Perhaps the parent actually was referring to the qualia component to emotion--or indeed qualia in general--which is much more difficult to explain.
Free will and emotions are other assumption we would likely not give these machines, so the worry of self-interest may not exist either, which would aid in making it good at something useful for us.
The question is, is it even possible to mimic human intelligence without emotion or free will? Who is to say they aren't wholly dependent on one another?
And if any group of people finds out how to imbue a machine with free will, I'd bet my life they'll go through with it.