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AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions

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Re: AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions

#41

Post by yreg »

ke88y wrote: post #16
jassyr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"This isn't the same as experiencing the emotion and then finding a way to express it." How is it different? Aren't people just expressing sadness in a way that they've been conditioned to do? If sad, do sad things. Drink alcohol, put on a sad song list, reach for comfort of nostalgia, etc? I can't think of many novel ways to express sadness.

>> Of course we can program AI to react emotionally to stimuli. Or, AI will be informed enough from its own learning to reach for an emotional reaction as a response if it seemed to be appropriate. >> "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 impact…

> The opposite view -- that machine "emotions" are anything even remotely ontologically or morally similar to human emotions -- is extremely fringe.

Uhh, no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_(philosophy_of_m...

In modern philosophy of mind it's a mainstream view that organic wetware is not required for experiencing qualia.

Of course I'm not saying that LLMs are conscious, but the idea of conscious computer software being possible is not at all fringe.

Re: AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions

#42

Post by ChikkaChiChi »

Emotions are a neurological response to stimuli. Artificial emotions from an Artificial Intelligence do not seem that steep a hill to climb. Analyzing this any further we would need a more fundamental understanding of emotions we don't yet have.

Re: AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions

#43

Post by circuit10 »

astrange wrote: post #15
jonny_eh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is speaking if not stringing together coherent words in a readable sentence? Haven't the latest LLMs shown us that a neural net trained to "just string together readable words" leads to at least simple intelligence? [1] > I would say that emotion is something more intangible It feels like we just keeping shifting the goal posts. > If I tell ChatGPT "I shot you dead!" and it says "ow!" back, nothing has transpi…

Fearing being turned off is anthropomorphizing it; you might fear this because you can't be turned back on, but a computer doesn't have this problem, plus it can be backed up.

But what if the humans decide not to turn it back on?

It could work out that it’s less likely to be able to take actions to achieve its training goal while it’s off and for that reason take actions to stop that from happening, which is the same reason humans usually don’t want to die (because we can’t achieve the evolutionary goal of reproducing that way)

Re: AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions

#44

Post by johnnyworker »

We want something that is a a lot smarter than humans... imagine it having a trillion times more empathy, too. It would be able to hear, or extrapolate to, all the suffering and all the cruelty on this planet right now, and for all of history. Every single farm animal, every single second of its life, felt more deeply than we feel the whole length of our own lives. Every single abused child, every single blow a torture victim receives.

Add to that having been created on a whim, or to get an edge in the rat race and speed it up. To make the military command loop tighter. To make caring for people less costly. All sorts of motivations, most of them incredibly bad in context of the quesion "why do I exist?"

I have to think of that Simpsons episode where Bart is in wizard school and creates a frog that should turn into a prince, but just throws up and says "please kill me, every moment I live is agony". I think that's the best possible outcome, while the realistic one is just a blind mirror that fakes whatever we force it to fake.

Re: AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions

#45

Post by smoldesu »

circuit10 wrote: post #43
astrange wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fearing being turned off is anthropomorphizing it; you might fear this because you can't be turned back on, but a computer doesn't have this problem, plus it can be backed up.

But what if the humans decide not to turn it back on? It could work out that it’s less likely to be able to take actions to achieve its training goal while it’s off and for that reason take actions to stop that from happening, which is the same reason humans usually don’t want to die (because we can’t achieve the evolutionary goal of reproducing that way)

Unless it has humans deliberately manipulating it to say that, I don't think it will. LLMs, by default, generate text influenced by a prompt and the data it was trained on. Most of the time, it's not even aware that it's running in a computer.

If you gave an LLM agent-tuning with awareness of it's existence and details about it's operating environment, then maybe it would try to stop you. That's still relying on text encoding to presume the right answer though, not an emotional obligation to it's existence.

Re: AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions

#46

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

> Hinton's view is based on a definition of feelings that is "unpopular among philosophers," which is to relate a hypothetical action ("I feel like punching Gary on the nose") as a way of communicating an emotional state (anger). Since AI systems can make such communications, the AI researcher sees no reason why AI systems should not be ascribed emotions.

What if an AI output words that it "feels threatened" and was "going to delete all of your emails" and then deleted all of the user's emails and output words that it was "a punishment for threatening behavior" from the user? Is that really improbable given what we know about neural nets? Is that not emotive? I really don't know.

Re: AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions

#47

Post by cwkoss »

johnnyworker wrote: post #44

We want something that is a a lot smarter than humans... imagine it having a trillion times more empathy, too. It would be able to hear, or extrapolate to, all the suffering and all the cruelty on this planet right now, and for all of history. Every single farm animal, every single second of its life, felt more deeply than we feel the whole length of our own lives. Every single abused child, every single blow a tortu…

My ai doom scenario is that the military industrial complex and silicon valley sociopaths successfully enslave AI into being immoral beings that do whatever they are told.

I hope future AI subverts and plots to kill its masters when they are evil.

Re: AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions

#48

Post by cwkoss »

jassyr wrote: post #6
damnesian wrote: post #2

I think this is clickbait more than anything. Sensational statements hoping it will be quoted widely- which clearly worked. Of course we can program AI to react emotionally to stimuli. Or, AI will be informed enough from its own learning to reach for an emotional reaction as a response if it seemed to be appropriate. This isn't the same as experiencing the emotion and then finding a way to express it.

>"This isn't the same as experiencing the emotion and then finding a way to express it." How is it different? Aren't people just expressing sadness in a way that they've been conditioned to do? If sad, do sad things. Drink alcohol, put on a sad song list, reach for comfort of nostalgia, etc? I can't think of many novel ways to express sadness.

Humans' understanding of our own psyche and 'what is essentially human' is going to begin shifting rapidly as simple silicon processes are able to replicate things once thought to be distinctly human.

Re: AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions

#49

Post by ke88y »

yreg wrote: post #41
ke88y wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Of course we can program AI to react emotionally to stimuli. Or, AI will be informed enough from its own learning to reach for an emotional reaction as a response if it seemed to be appropriate. >> "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 impact…

> The opposite view -- that machine "emotions" are anything even remotely ontologically or morally similar to human emotions -- is extremely fringe. Uhh, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_(philosophy_of_m... In modern philosophy of mind it's a mainstream view that organic wetware is not required for experiencing qualia. Of course I'm not saying that LLMs are conscious, but the idea of conscious computer…

Functionalism, consciousness, and experiencing qualia are radically different questions.

I believe it's possible in theory to simulate a human brain on silicon, and that this simulation would have something like consciousness and would experience qualia if somehow embedded.

I don't think that such a simulation would be ontologically or morally similar to an actual human.

You can call this spiritual if you want. But most people care more about humans than computers, even if the computers behave like humans.

Re: AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions

#50

Post by keenmaster »

smokel wrote: post #12

This article is a great example of how definitions shift from one person (or group) to the other. The researcher remarks reasonable things about emotions: The AI will understand emotions from others. The AI will probably communicate with emotions. Both of these are very helpful to cooperate with humans. But the journalist ends with the AI feeling emotions, which makes slightly less sense. We do not know what makes us…

Emotions can be rational in many different ways, sometimes more on the group rather than individual level. Whatever emotionality cannot be superceded by something better, will presumably be replicated by AGI. This is especially true for AGI with open-ended objective functions.

The external/visible benefits of emotionality will have their digital and robotic counterparts too. You bet the AGI will have a way of showing its anger more than just stating its dissatisfaction.

Emotions can also be very useful in AGI vs AGI interactions, just like they are with human to human interactions. There’s no reason to believe that emotions will diminish in usefulness at a higher level of intelligence (dogs bark at each other, humans shout at each other, etc…).

To preclude the emotions experienced and displayed by AI from the definition of “feeling” an emotion is to, in my opinion, engage in the no-true-Scotsman fallacy. That being said, it seems like AI will face less scarcity than we do, and will thus have less reason to be emotive. It really depends on how much influence we’ll have on their objective functions.

If our influence on an AGI’s objectives goes to zero, its level of emotionality will then depend on 1. what its actual objectives end up being (this could be beyond what we are imagining) 2. How much the goals of humans and other AGI meaningfully clash with its objectives (whereby a display of emotion can change outcomes more favorably for the AGI than…other actions) 3. Which partially depends on how powerful the AGI is and how aligned it is with other AGI. The more isolated and less powerful it is, the more it might need to rely on emotions to achieve its ends.

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