Going back to AI, as emotions cannot be truly implemented in a program – no matter how sophisticated it may be – the reasoning of the computer can never be changed by its feelings. This shows that emotions influence reasoning. Indeed, when they received positive feedback in native Chinese, they were 10% more likely to take a bet in the next round, irrespective of risk. We hypothesised that giving them feedback in their mother tongue would be more emotional to them and so lead them to behave differently, compared to when they received feedback in their second language, English. In each round, they had to take or leave a proposed bet shown on the screen – for example, a 50% chance of winning 20 points, and a 50% chance of losing 100 points. We asked native speakers of Mandarin Chinese studying at Bangor University to play a game of chance for money. In an experiment conducted in 2015, we were able to put this to the test. To program something, you not only need to know how it works, you need to know what the objective is. Their source is the source of everything, and not simply an attribute of the mind that can be implemented by design. Yet emotions are a mysterious evolutionary legacy. We can describe how we come to rational decisions, write rules and turn these rules into process and code.
On the other hand, we know a lot about reasoning. But when the words had a negative meaning, such as “murder” or “rape”, their brain blocked access to their mother tongue – without their knowledge. When we presented our participants with positive and neutral words, such as “holiday” or “tree”, they unconsciously retrieved these word forms in Chinese. In a study conducted with Chinese-English bilinguals, we explored how the emotional value of words can change unconscious mental operation.
Psychologists and neuroscientists are certainly trying to learn how emotions interact with cognition, but still they remain a mystery. The cold, hard truth is that – despite what computer scientists say – we will never be able to program emotions in the way HAL’s fictional creators did because we do not understand them. But though HAL makes emotional statements, a real world AI would certainly be limited to having only the ability to reason, and make decisions. The disconnection feels like a vengeful termination, after witnessing the film’s earlier events. In fact, viewers begin to feel that Bowman is killing HAL.
0 kommentar(er)
