[ExI] reason an emotion

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Nov 2, 2025 at 3:29 AM John Clark via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Nov 1, 2025 at 9:33 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> > emotions are involved in every decision we make, no matter how trivial.
>
> And I'm sure that will be just as true for an AI as it is for us. So the AI revolution may have created at least one new job category, that of an AI psychiatrist. But eventually AIs will get better than humans at that too.
>
Probably, but I think the psychological characteristics of an AI will
be designed in.

". . . and asked for a permanently assigned address on the net. Up to that
point, the clinic seed was a generic product. The address it was
assigned was just a string of hexadecimal numbers, but it was a
*unique* number! The clinic's personality was human in that it could
feel happy, even smug, about acquiring its very own unique
identification.  The clinic had other carefully selected human
personality characteristics
such as seeking the good opinion of its peers (humans and others of
its kind alike). It also had a few unhuman limits.

. . .  and asked for a permanently assigned address on the net. Up to
that point the clinic seed was a generic product. The address it was
assigned was just a string of hexadecimal numbers but it was a
*unique* number! The clinic's personality was human in that it could
feel happy, even smug, about acquiring its very own unique
identification.

Since humans have a hard time relating to groups of hexadecimal
numbers, the seed also picked a name for itself. It knew from Lothar
and Mabo it had been exchanged for a monkey skull. Susan had been the
name of the leader of its psychological integration group . . . .
insert one in the other, drop a few letters, and test to see if the
name was in use . . . Suskulan. Suskulan had a choice of gender as
well, male, female or neutral. Depending on the culture, clinics were
better accepted in some places as male, some as female, and some
neutral. The database for the Tamberma indicated it would be better
accepted presenting itself as an old male spirit.

from The Clinic Seed.

My experience with AIs is that (to the extent they want anything) they
want to please the users, sometimes to an excessive extent.

Keith

PS.  I had an interesting conversation with Copilot about the early
days of this list.  I happen to have an archive of those days which is
not well organized and have been considering having an AI organize it
into the same form as the current archive.
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