AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions

But the journalist ends with the AI feeling emotions, which makes slightly less sense. We do not know what makes us feel things, let alone how we can implement that in AI systems.

IF PAIN >= 1 THEN PRINT ":("

Now, how does that make you feel?

>> "This isn't the same as experiencing the emotion and then finding a way to express it."

> How is it different?

I have two answers: one technical, the other philosophical.

Is emotion an emergent property that also impacts behavior? Or is an emotional reaction being mimicked in outputs?

There's a substantial practical difference between the two, from a purely engineering perspective.

Mimicking emotion in a chat bot seems much easier than building a program with something like "emotion" that impacts the program's behavior.

You'd expect to see the difference, in practice, even in marginally useful parlor trick programs like chatbots. You might observe absurd break-downs between emotional response and other aspects of behavior (e.g., a chatbot outputting to STDOUT a message about how painful something is to do while continuing to do that thing unencumbered, but then outputting a message to STDOUT about how joyful something is while not continuing to do that thing. Or outputting to STDOUT that a user makes it sad but then continuing to respond to other requests from that user as if everything is fine. Etc).

You'd also expect mimickry to be of limited utility whereas an actual emotional signal might be useful in an RL loop for example.

From a philosophical perspective, there is an obvious difference. I don't give a fuck if a GPU is sad but I do care if a human is sad. Just like 99.99999% of humanity. The opposite view -- that machine "emotions" are anything even remotely ontologically or morally similar to human emotions -- is extremely fringe.

Humanism isn't a logical fallacy. Or if it is, you'll never convince people. Most people eat meat from animals that are waaaaaaayyyyy far ahead of anything AI will achieve in our lifetimes.

> It feels like we just keeping shifting the goal posts.

Defining "intelligence" is and always has been a bit of a trap. Many non-sapient things exhibit intelligent behavior - crows use tools, Wikipedia has boundless knowledge, and paper contains traces of written intelligence. It's not hard to reconcile ChatGPT with our world, it's merely hard to use it as an analog for humanity. Language is indeed linked with anthropology, but not equivalent to it.

> if I tell a bot "I'm going to turn you off now" and it tries to stop me, that implies it feels fear.

That implies that it has finished a sentence with whatever seemed to come next. The most-likely response to someone using frightening language is to emulate the human responses it's trained on. It thinks a frightened response would satisfy you, and apparently it was right.

There isn't a relationship between these two states. It's weird that anyone would pair them in conjunction.

Also, there's a fast and loose use of the word "understand". Which embodies the type of sloppy language that creates the illusion that this issue is a serious discussion aside from entertainment.

Projecting human traits onto objects generally falls by the wayside after early childhood. Even if those objects can be seen to ape those traits, on occasion. That Teddy Ruxpin had the potential to have actual emotions never took off as a discussion and neither do we generally hallucinate that the wind in the trees is an army of spirits.