If you follow the news, you’ve noticed that we’ve made advances in “artificial intelligence.”
I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think if we have advances in artificial intelligence, we must also be able to have advances in artificial emotion.
It would be wonderful if logic were limited to syllogisms. But, as Wittgenstein pointed out, language has its own internal logic.
If you are giving directions to the café, you are committed to using the words “left” and “right.” It’s a package deal. You can’t decide to exclude one and expect to talk meaningfully. The logic of that language game requires it.
We use the words “intelligence” and “emotion” in a similar way, in talking about ways in which experience comes to us or is shaped by our senses. If you decide there’s such a thing as artificial intelligence, you can’t exclude discussion of artificial emotion. If you do, you’re changing the way we use words in ordinary language. That’s not necessarily fatal, but we all ought to take note, as when we notice signs saying we’ve wandered off the main road into an old minefield.
What would artificial emotion look like?
The philosopher Robert Nozick had a notion called the Experience Machine. Imagine a system in which experts could use technology — perhaps using the techniques of deep brain stimulation — to create any kind of experience you wanted. You could experience winning the Nobel Prize or the Olympics. You’d experience any pleasure you wanted.
If you couldn’t tell the difference, wouldn’t the experience be authentic in some way? Wouldn’t the artificial emotion of winning that Nobel in literature be just as good as actually doing it? And isn’t that the same kind of question people are asking when they say that artificial intelligence is close to indistinguishable from the normal variety?
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