AI Emotions

Dan Clemmensen (Dan@Clemmensen.ShireNet.com)
Wed, 24 Jun 1998 20:05:33 -0400

I'm not sure what an "emotion" is. I can attempt a definition based
on introspection, but it's a bit safer to describe emotions based
on actions exhibited by other people and animals.

This leads to a problem. Many complex systems exhibit behaviours that
appear to be emotional. Such systems include governments, religions,
telephone systems, machinery, and computer systems. Generally, the "emotional" behaviour is not designed, but is an emergent
behaviour
that IMO results from the complexity of the system. It's not
going to be difficult to program emotional behaviour into an AI. In
fact, it'll be difficult to avoid this behaviour.