[ExI] Unfrendly AI is a mistaken idea.

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 24/05/07, John K Clark <jonkc at att.net> wrote:

The friendly AI people have the additional
> problem of explaining away the fact that the slave in question is without
> a
> doubt vastly more intelligent than they are; I imagine they rationalize
> this
> by saying, against all the evidence, that emotion is harder to achieve
> than
> intelligence, that emotion is the secret sauce that only a meat brain can
> produce never a silicon brain; so they delude themselves that the super
> intelligent AI is just a souped up adding machine. Or perhaps they think
> emotion is  something tacked on and they just won't tack it onto their AI,
> as if one also needed to tack on a Beethoven circuit on a radio if you
> wished it to play Beethoven. And then I imagine they just refuse to think
> how evolution could ever have produced emotion if it weren't intimately
> linked to intelligence.
>

Emotion is linked to motivation, not intelligence per se. Intelligence is an
ability, like being able to lift heavy things. The ability to lift heavy
things would never have evolved naturally without an associated motivation
to do so, but we build powerful lifting machines that would sit there
rusting if we didn't provide motivation for them to do their thing.
Similarly, there is nothing contradictory in a machine capable of
fantastically complex cognitive feats that would just sit there inertly
unless specifically offered a problem, and then solve the problem as an
intellectual exercise, completely disinterested in any practical
applications. There is even a model for this in human mental illness:
patients with so-called negative symptoms of schizophrenia can be
cognitively and physically intact, but lack motivation and the ability to
experience emotion.

-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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