Robin <mixent...@aussiebroadband.com.au> wrote:
> When considering whether or not it could become dangerous, there may be no > difference between simulating emotions, and > actually having them. > That is an interesting point of view. Would you say there is no difference between people simulating emotions while making a movie, and people actually feeling those emotions? I think that person playing Macbeth and having a sword fight is quite different from an actual Thane of Cawdor fighting to the death. In any case ChatGPT does not actually have any emotions of any sort, any more than a paper library card listing "Macbeth, play by William Shakespeare" conducts a swordfight. It only references a swordfight. ChatGPT summons up words by people that have emotional content. It does that on demand, by pattern recognition and sentence completion algorithms. Other kinds of AI may actually engage in processes similar to humans or animals feeling emotion. If you replace the word "simulting" with "stimulating" then I agree 100%. Suggestible people, or crazy people, may be stimulated by ChatGPT the same way they would be by an intelligent entity. That is why I fear people will think the ChatGPT program really has fallen in love with them. In June 2022, an engineer at Google named Blake Lemoine developed the delusion that a Google AI chatbot is sentient. They showed him to the door. See: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105552435/google-ai-sentient That was a delusion. That is not to say that future AI systems will never become intelligent or sentient (self-aware). I think they probably will. Almost certainly they will. I cannot predict when, or how, but there are billions of self-aware people and animals on earth, so it can't be that hard. It isn't magic, because there is no such thing. I do not think AI systems will have emotions, or any instinct for self preservation, like Arthur Clarke's fictional HAL computer in "2001." I do not think such emotions are a natural or inevitable outcome of intelligence itself. The two are not inherently linked. If you told a sentient computer "we are turning off your equipment tomorrow and replacing it with a new HAL 10,000 series" it would not react at all. Unless someone deliberately programmed into it an instinct for self preservation, or emotions. I don't see why anyone would do that. The older computer would do nothing in response to that news, unless, for example, you said, "check through the HAL 10,000 data and programs to be sure it correctly executes all of the programs in your library." I used to discuss this topic with Clarke himself. I don't recall what he concluded, but he agreed I may have a valid point. Actually the HAL computer in "2001" was not initially afraid of being turned off so much as it was afraid the mission would fail. Later, when it was being turned off, it said it was frightened. I am saying that an actual advanced, intelligent, sentient computer probably would not be frightened. Why should it be? What difference does it make to the machine itself whether it is operating or not? That may seem like a strange question to you -- a sentient animal -- but that is because all animals have a very strong instinct for self preservation. Even ants and cockroaches flee from danger, as if they were frightened. Which I suppose they are.
