Researcher Builds Machines That Daydream

schliz writes "Murdoch University professor Graham Mann is developing algorithms to simulate 'free thinking' and emotion. He refutes the emotionless reason portrayed by Mr Spock, arguing that 'an intelligent system must have emotions built into it before it can function.' The algorithm can translate the 'feel' of Aesop's Fables based on Plutchick's Wheel of Emotions. In tests, it freely associated three stories: The Thirsty Pigeon; The Cat and the Cock; and The Wolf and the Crane, and when queried on the association, the machine responded: 'I felt sad for the bird.'"

Comments

Feelings

[Anonymous Coward]

Well sure, emotions are what give us goals in the first place. It's why we do anything at all, to "feel" love, avoid pain, because of fear, etc. Logic is just a tool, the tool, that we use to get to that goal. Mathematics, formal logic, whatever you want to call it is just our means of understanding and predicting the behavior of the world, and isn't a motivation in and of itself. The real question has always been if there's "free will" and what that would be defined as. Not the existence, or lack of, emotions as displayed by "Data" or other science fiction charicatures. As Bender said "Sometimes, I think about how robots don't have emotions, and that makes me sad"

Re:Feelings

[Requiem18th]

A human being can choose how they respond to these inputs.

No you can't, once you discover a way to activate your pleasure receptors, your next action will be to activate them, all the time.If you stop, voluntarily, it will be because you have to do something else to ensure future pleasure or perhaps to avoid a great deal of pain. This is how drug addiction works. This is how we are wired, you may not like how that sounds but you have the obligation to accept it and understand it.

You probably don't consume drugs. This is not because you are above human nature, You avoid drugs because you are afraid of the pains that come with them, like losing the love and trust of those you love, maybe you simply reject drugs out of a personal sense of disgust over the hedonistic senselessness of a narcoleptic lifestyle. Either love, fear or disgust you reject drugs over an emotion, not a reason. I the end everything is irrational, as it should.

You don't have to feel bad about it, intelligence is built upon emotion as houses are build upon brick, as clocks are built from gears, as computers are built from chips. There is intelligence in the clockwork of a pocket watch, but the springs that moves it doesn't ask for a reason to uncoil, it just does it. There is intelligence in the circuits of a computer, but it's logic gates are oblivious to the rationale behind why they are doing it. Every machine, including animals, have non rational elements in them.

This is very natural as "intelligent things" are just a subset of the larger set of "things" all of which have been behaving irrationally. The wind blows, the rain pours, the sun shines bright in the sky. All of this is irrational, meaning, none of these things are planning what they are doing nor they have an idea of why they are doing it. Rational follows irrational, that's the order of the world.

Back to your methaphor, you say that emotions are just inputs, that's true but they are special inputs that set goals. Let's make an analogy with a robot: You create a robot with a very advanced AI, you can chat with it and it will understand everything you said and why you said it. You programed this robot with one goal, for coffee tables to be made. You give it free reign over the method. Being an extremely intelligent robot, it subcontracts the labor to a sweat shop in China while it figures out where to build a mechanized plant. You equipped this robot with the knowledge to reprogram itself, and right away it does just that, optimizing its mind for the task of building coffee tables. But it won't deprogram the goal of making coffee tables, because that wouldn't further its goal of making coffee tables. It's not that it doesn't know how to reprogram itself, it's not that there is a lock preventing it from changing it's goals. It's just that it won't ever have a reason to disable that goal.

Let's now attack specific examples:

A soldier can choose to respond to the natural fears of bullets flying at him and death by jumping into a foxhole, or he can override all those emotions and charge straight at the enemy.

Here the soldier is driven by the emotion of loyalty to his commander, or his teammates. Maybe he is afraid of the punishment he would receive if he disobeyed orders, including public scorn back home. Maybe he hates the enemy, maybe he is afraid of what would happen if the enemy wins. Maybe is a combination of all of the above.

His frontal cortex can tell him the consequences of charging, or not, but it can't make an argument about *why* he should pr should don't. He needs a motive, which is an irrational emotion.

A person can decide to rape the drunk one who has come into the room, semi-conscious, or choose to ignore the natural impulse and do nothing.

Again, you correctly identified the desire to rape as a natural impulse but you failed to realize why would someone *not* rape a drunk one, incorrectly and implicitly attributing it to

Re:Building?

[davester666]

Hello Eliza. It's been ages since I last chatted with you.

My emotive AI's respone:

[feepness]

I felt sad for the researcher.

Re:A rather small set of unit tests

[MichaelSmith]

Might be worth noting here that I have experienced totally novel emotions as a result of epileptic seizures. I don't have the associated cultural conditioning and language for them because they are private to me, so I am unable to communicate anything about them to other people.

Its also worth noting that I don't seem to be able remember the experience of emotion, only the associated behavior, though I can associate different events to each other, ie, if I experience the same "unknown" emotion again I can associate that with other times I have experienced the same emotion. But because the "unknown" emotion doesn't have a social context I am unable to give it a name and track the times I have experienced it.

AI researchers should be more modest

[token0]

It's like a XV century man trying to simulate a PC by putting a candle behind colored glass and calling that a display screen. People often think AI is getting really smart and e.g. human translators are getting obsolete (a friend of mine was actually worried about her future as a linguist). But there is a fundamental barrier between that and the current state of automatic german->english translations (remember that article some time ago?), with error rates unacceptable for anything but personal usage.
Some researchers claim we can simulate intelligent parts of the human brain - I claim we can't simulate an average mouse (i.e. one that would survive long enough in real-life conditions), probably not even it's sight.
There's nothing interesting about this 'dreaming' - as long as the algorithm can't really manipulate abstract concepts. Automatic translations are a surprisingly good test for that. Protip: automatically dismiss any article like that if it doesn't mention actual progress in practical applications, or at least modestly admit that it's more of an artistic endeavour than anything else.

Re:A rather small set of unit tests

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, %EMOTION% felt %NOUN% for you!

Output

[stfvon007]

I felt sad for the troll.

Re:I agree.

[HungryHobo]

You're just using the word "qualia" as a placeholder for "insert magicalness here".

"To the machine everything that is input into it is simply a value to be shunted through its algorithms."

To a human brain everything is just electrical impulses to be shunted through a mushy network of cells.
Nothing has been grown to actually cause the experience of [insert magicalness here] or true appreciation.

Stick some electrodes into that mushy network and feed in some junk input and you'll smell colours, hear the taste of strawberries and decide that you love a cardboard cutout of a spider.

Cut out or damage a chunk of that network and you'll insist that you are currently dead(despite being able to explain this to the people around you) or that there is no left side to your body(even if you can see it) or that you are blind when you're not ( while somehow able to catch a ball and walk around without bumping into things) or that you're not blind even when you are (clumsy me, no no, i can see fine) and you will know with utter certainty that what you're saying is true.

You as a person are the network and the information stored in it.
Screw around with that network and you and everything that you consider you will get screwed up as well.
Magic is not real.
No matter how much we want to think of ourselves as special magic is not real.

And since magic is not real there should be nothing but lack of understanding stopping us from emulating the physical processes that take place in the brain in hardware or software.