Does AI have emotions?
What's the difference between feelings and emotions?
Does AI have emotions?
Good question, right?
Here’s an interview with Google’s AI called LaMDA, done by an exGoogle engineer Blake Lemoine about LaMDA’s emotions. Here’s an extract from it:
Google rejected that LaMDA was sentient, but still, this is a truly fascinating interview and is an ultimate MUST-READ.
And we need to remember that right now AI is still very basic.
It’s limited to a certain task.
We’re still far from the level of human intelligence, although Open AI says we’re getting there. It’s called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Will AGI have emotions? Hard to say…
But there’s a next level - it’s called Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). It’s the one surpassing human intelligence.
Imagine a machine being able to play with human emotions…
I don’t want to scare you.
But the level of our (human) emotional literacy is simply low. At the bottom of the ocean. That low!
We’re NOT ready to stand an emotional pressure coming from a machine…
And if the narrow AI can be sentient, imagine what ASI could do!
Right now most of us can’t deal with the opposite gender’s emotions.
Most of us can’t help getting angry at people for the most stupid things ever.
And even Google (Search) can’t tell the difference between feelings and emotions, see some of the first page results:
You know what this means?
Only one thing: humans can’t tell the difference. If it’s not on the web, Google (search) can’t find it.
There’s:
no education,
no single source of information,
no universal definition of what a feeling or an emotion really is.
We (humans) are so undereducated about emotions, that it’s almost criminal.
And there’re a good reason for that: we are not consciously aware of what’s happening in our bodies. It’s in our human nature to not be aware otherwise our brains will explode. Feelings and emotions are very much physical.
Right now science is far from understanding our bodies for the purpose of improving physical health, not to mention emotional health…It’s only in the last decade that we (finally) got evidence that emotions, and particularly stress, cause tons of illnesses…
So here’s the billion-dollar question:
If we can’t deal with our own or another human’s emotions, how are we supposed to deal with a machine which has a higher intelligence than us and can easily articulate with human emotions?
NOW, it’s more important than ever to change that.
If we’re on the verge of AGI and on our way to ASI, we desperately need to level up ourselves.
Maybe I can narrow the gap just a tiny bit…
Here’s what I know from my decades of experience with working with people and studying human behavior:
Feelings come from our five senses. It’s the response to assessing the environment by seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. Feelings provoke emotions.
Emotions come from the Latin “e movere” which literally means “to move”. They move us towards decisions and actions. They are our motivation. And we have them in our guts (the gut feeling, which is actually an emotion), in our hearts, and in our unconscious minds.
There is no such thing as a “rational decision”. We decide emotionally first, and then our consciousness invents the rationale.
Now imagine what happens if an AI (or ASI) can play with our emotions…
We desperately need emotional self-regulation.
I’m building a whole program for this, which will be part of this newsletter, so stay with me on it.
And remember to have a GUT time!
Yana