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Comment by alexanderdmitri | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I never see brought into the equation but I believe is fundamental to human "general" intelligence is emotional response. It's hugely instrumental in terms of us deciding what's important to investigate, which input to analyze and how to mold our output. The importance of emotion in guiding and driving our learning is most evident in children, during the first four or five years of life of development.

I think a huge leap forward in the field could be made by modeling an emotional system similar to ours. It also seems like it would be an incredibly difficult and fuzzy problem to solve.

Addendum: After thinking about it for a few minutes more, I bet an implicit understanding of cause and effect could be derived by a system designed to try to optimize it's emotional state

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Not just emotion, but also aversion to certain physical states - such as hunger or pain.

Because of that, I think a "true AI" - at least one without a simulated humanlike body - would have rather different desires. Optimization towards those desires rather than humanlike desires would likely result in something that distinctly does not act human.

I can't help but wonder if we've ignored or disregarded any first steps to a general AI because the resulting building blocks didn't match any of our expectations from real-world models of instinct/intelligence.

I do think the impact of emotions on our thinking is understated, but I also think that focusing on this aspect is going at it backwards. A value system is necessary for emotions, otherwise happy and sad mean nothing. I think this is what you mean when you talk about "modeling emotions". At the same time, some intelligence seems like a prerequisite as blindly following a value system will lead to massive hedonistic AI orgies. Er, I mean, an override mechanism is required, and intelligence is the best possible solution, so we're back at the fundamental problem. I think there is a lot more intelligence behind even our most primitive urges than we realize. Hope that made sense, typing on mobile.

Or perhaps another angle can be explored - better than human intelligence directly instead of copying humans.

There are certain machines already better than humans(any other life form) in physical tasks — why do we need to have human intelligence as the base scale to measure machine intelligence?

I mean, the early man didn’t create his tools to compete with human nails.

> A value system is necessary for emotion

I think a value system is mostly a post hoc justification of our emotional states. I view emotions as primarily a tight biochemical feedback loop. Think more of the four “f”s than, say, platonic feelings of love.

I think it’s the opposite - they come from innate chemical values (procreation, socialization, base metabolic needs) and emotions are created upwards from reaction to stimuli as it pertains to those values. Maybe we’re saying the same thing, but the starting point is important as it pertains to any artificial intelligence being able to be created.

Isn't this the theory of co sciousness presented in After On? I am curious what people are formally studying emotional theories of co sciousness. I'd love to read more.

You've read After On? How was it? I picked up a copy a couple of weeks ago but haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Is it worth bumping it up the priority queue a bit?

It could start with a value system rather than raw emotions - at some point it might decide that it doesn’t really want to do some work. The idea of controllability in all senses I think complicates the issue, but it’s definitely a necessary safety net.

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