[ExI] Unfrendly AI is a mistaken idea.

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 06/06/07, John K Clark <jonkc at att.net> wrote:

> I get angry because I have the sort of neurological hardware
> >that allows  me to get angry
>
> I certainly can't disagree with that.
>
> > if I didn't have that hardware, I would never get angry
>
> True, and you'd never be intelligent either, you'd just be a few hundred
> pounds of protoplasm.


You would expect it to be very difficult to disentangle emotions from
intelligence in a human, since as you have stated previously emotions
predate intelligence phylogenetically. Nevertheless, there are naturally
occurring experiments in psychiatric practice where emotions and
intelligence are seen to go their separate ways. To give just one example,
some types of schizophrenia with predominantly so-called negative symptoms
can result in an almost complete blunting of emotion: happiness, sadness,
anxiety, anger, surprise, love, aesthetic appreciation, regret, empathy,
interest, etc. The patients can sometimes remember that they used to
experience things more intensely, and describe the change in themselves.
Such insight mercifully does not lead to suicidality as often as one might
think, because that would involve being passionate about something.
Invariably, these patients don't do very much left to their own devices
because they lack motivation, there being no pleasure in doing something or
pain in not doing it. However, if they are given intelligence tests they
score as well, or almost as well, as premorbidly, and if they are forced to
action because someone expects it of them, they generally are able to
complete a task. Thus it isn't necessarily true that without emotions you're
an idiot, even in the case of the human brain in which evolution has seen to
it from the start that emotions and intelligence are intricately
intertwined.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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