Can machines express emotion
Emotions seem to be different than thought. But let's talk about why they're not. Let's go back . . . and put it into the context of emotion: What is love?
There is this fellow who says, 'I've met this wonderful person, and she's good in these respects,' and so forth. Then when you look at this, this is really infatuation. People will say, 'Well, love is different,' but in fact, everything is different. When two people have a relationship, there are dozens of different ways in which they can be related. But one of them is to have a filter, which ignores all the things that you would normally regard as undesirable or repellant in a person and everything looks perfect. Though we normally think of this as a positive thing, you can think of it as a sort of self-mutilation where you're turning off all the machinery in your head which would be criticising them and saying, 'Don't get involved with this.' You can see why a mechanism like that would evolve. Nobody who understood the world would have children and spend 10 years working very hard to support these creatures. In fact, some people are deficient in that.
So there are all sorts of different processes that combine to produce complex thoughts that we call emotions?
Some of these are built-in. We've evolved little control things that activate, some parts of the brain and turn off others so that . . . when you're angry, you probably turn off some of your long-range planning machinery and turn on systems that are good for solving problems very quickly, although not very elegantly. We turn on some self-defense mechanisms because evolution has discovered that if you appear to be very aggressive, the enemy might go away. So you turn on various mechanisms that will make it look to the other person as though . . . you don't have any alternatives, so they better retreat. So something like anger, you can see it as a very clever intimidation system. Of course, the person who is experiencing it doesn't know how it works because you've turned off your critical machinery.
It's a blinding agent.
In the case of some type of love relationship, what you do is try to guess what the other person's goals are and adopt them. Some people romanticise this by saying that you're merging and sharing common interests. In fact, you are, because if the thing works out well, you will start to have the same goals.
We've had learning machines. We're not even there with thinking machines. Now, you raise the possibility of emotion machines. In the context of the title, do you just want to understand the emotion machines in the human psyche and brain?
Well, the title is for annoying as many people as possible. [Laughter]
How so?
Because the main point of the book is that it's trying to make theories of how thinking works. Our traditional idea is that there is something called 'thinking' and that it is contaminated, modulated or affected by emotions. What I am saying is that emotions aren't separate.
So emotion is thinking.
Yeah. Each emotional state is a slightly different way of thinking or a very different way. The reason that we do this is that any particular way of thinking is only going to be good for solving certain problems, just as any way of representing knowledge would be good for only solving certain problems.
How long do you think it will be before we have machines that can calculate and express emotion?
The central problem is that we don't have any kind of machine-thinking that covers much of a range of problems. Part of the book that you haven't seen yet, but it's sort of implied in Society of Mind, is that we've got to develop theories of common-sense reasoning. No machines have much of this, which is why you can't talk to a machine much, except maybe for an airline reservation where the machine has a lot of knowledge about seating and routing.
