emotionless AIs

Brent Allsop (allsop@swttools.fc.hp.com)
Mon, 22 Jun 1998 16:29:41 -0600


Randall R Randall <rrandall6@juno.com> asked:

> What reason do you have to believe that AIs
> *can* be made without emotions? It may
> be that that level of complexity will always
> develop emotions of some sort.

We can, today, make a simple color detecting machine that can
tell us what color something is better than any human can. There is
no significant "level of complexity" involved with such a relatively
simple machine. But we all know darned well that what we use to
represent color with is phenomenally different than what any such
abstract machine would use to represent color. The machine may
abstractly represent what color something is, but it doesn't know
anything about, abstractly or not, what it is like for us to
experience such colors. I'm sure emotions are very similar. Machines
can abstractly model them and the corresponding behavior, but such
models aren't anything like the true, fundamentally real thing we
experience.

Brent Allsop