Friday, April 7, 2017

Emotional Behavior

When you got hurt as a child, did you cry? Is crying a learned or natural emotional behavior? It's definitely natural; even as infants we cry or display some type of emotional behavior. So then what is the difference between learned and natural emotional behavior? To answer this question, let us refer to the episode of black mirror, particularly the scene when Martha told Ash 2.0 to jump.

Was the emotion learned or natural? I say natural in the sense that Ash 2.0 was programmed to give emotional reactions. Similarly, we are programmed to have emotional responses. The main difference is that we're programmed by a brain and firing of hormones while robots are programmed through mother boards and firing of electrodes. Thus, emotional behavior is normal for both humans and AI. An issue arises when either a human or robot does not display the right emotion at the right time, yet failure to act appropriately does not negate the naturalness of emotion; it just simply means that either the human or bot have not been taught when to display emotion. 

3 comments:

  1. interesting position, and I like where you're going with it. However, is there absolutely no difference between human emotion and robot 'emotion'? Is the programming involved in human learning the same as in artificial learning?

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    1. I think that the difference is based upon interpretation, not to say there's no difference, but that emotional portrayals are interpreted differently based on observers, so just from an outsider perspective there is no difference in the display, if done at "appropriate" times. I think what separates us from robots is that we are able to think and reflect on what we feel and sometimes understand why we feel a certain way.

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    2. thanks for the clarification, that helps!

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