[extropy-chat] Affective computing: Candy bars for the soul

[Robin Hanson]

On 12/13/2003, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>Wired has recently run an article on "affective computing" ... about 
>detecting and simulating emotions.  ...  This is an incredibly early form 
>of the technology and I don't expect problems for at least a decade, but 
>when it hits it will hit hard. ... it's about programs with incredibly 
>realistic graphics and means for recognizing emotions in their targets, 
>being able to deploy apparent behaviors that act as superstimuli for human 
>emotional responses.  Think of chocolate chip cookies for emotions. 
>Chocolate chip cookies are a more powerful stimulus than hunter-gatherer 
>tastebuds ever encounter, combining sugar, fat, and salt in greater 
>quantity and purer quality.  And likewise there's a limit to the sympathy, 
>support, approval, and admiration humans can expect from their human 
>mates.  As any evolutionary theorist knows, a human male is not designed 
>as the human female's ideal boyfriend, nor vice versa.
>Candy bars for the soul.  It's not that all synthetic foods are bad.  ... 
>But it takes so much more knowledge to do it right... and the side effects 
>of the things that "just taste good" are negative, complicated, very hard 
>to understand, unforeseen in advance.  People at large understand the one 
>*obvious* side effect once they've seen it: People bloating up like 
>balloons.  But also losing insulin sensitivity, and a lot of other 
>problems that aren't visible to the naked eye. ...
>I could be surprised, but what Laura presages is probably NOT a good 
>thing.  Transhumanism needs to lose the optimism about outcomes.  Nobody 
>is taking into account the fact that problems are hard and humans are 
>stupid.  Watch this space for serious developments in some unknown amount 
>of time, my wild guess being a decade, and quite possibly nothing 
>happening if "faking it well" turns out to be AI-complete. ...

This is a reasonable topic for concern, but I'm not as nearly concerned as 
you seem to be, because of our long track record of dealing with similar 
problems.  It's not just that food is far more tasty than in the past; 
media and music today are far more entertaining, and advertising is far 
more persuasive, than ancient analogies could have been.  Our evolved 
habits in these things probably also mislead us to emphasize the wrong 
things.  We probably think we have more friends because we watch "Friends" 
on TV, for example.

But given how vastly different our world is from the ancient world, it is 
amazing that we do as well as we do.  The human mind seems to be relatively 
robust, and able to adapt to radically different circumstances.  Probably 
the biggest way in which our minds have been misled, relative to the 
ancient problems they were designed to solve, is whatever it is that causes 
the demographic transition, causing rich societies to have far fewer 
children than evolution could possibly have "intended."  I wish we 
understood this better; it might give us a better clue about the other 
problems.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323