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Comment by georgeorwell | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

>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.

The lack of certain emotional responses isn't the same as the lack of all emotion.

That's lack of empathy, failure to feel for others. It's not the same thing.

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.

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-psy...

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.

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