In a recent article in Forbes, Rob Toews offered a series of historical quotes about "AI" (I prefer the term #PseudoIntelligence). As a conversation starter, I'd like to provide comments on each of those quotes, one-a-day, and hope that interesting threads emerge.
The first quote is by Marvin Minsky, who I met when he was alive and could tell some interesting stories about, but I'm saving those for my next book. In 1986, Minsky said:
"The question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions."
Out of context, this is classic AI Hype framing, where the idea that machines can have emotions is assumed to be true without any intellectual, let alone, scientific examination of that question. In the original context, which is a section of Minsky's Society of The Mind entitled Emotion, I'm sorry to say that not a lot more intellectual or scientific consideration is given to this issue, either.
To find a more thorough consideration of this issue, a useful source is Antonio Damasio's wonderful and insightful book The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, which I highly recommend. Amongst many other perspective-altering observations, Damasio draws a distinction between feelings and emotions. In this dichotomy, the former are activities of the "old brains" that exist in our bodies, which evolved as complex thinking entities long before the emergence of the brains in our heads. These systems are our guts, our immune and hormone systems, as well as our peripheral nervous systems. Most people don't consider the complexity of these systems, and that they do a lot on their own, without reference to the central nervous system, while also interactively communicating with the it.
Complex states of those "old brains" are feelings. Cognitive impressions of them in the head brain are emotions. Emotions, as Minsky rightly points our, are essential to human decision making ("intelligence") under real-world complexity.
However, one must ask, can a machine have emotions without feelings? And what are feelings if not a part of a biological gut, immune and hormone system, or peripheral nervous system, as well as its highly complex interactions with the brain?
Maybe a machine can have something like feelings? We'd have to check any assertion in that area carefully for wishful mnemonics. But for now, I think we can say that machines can't have feelings in any human sense. And therefore, they can't have anything like emotions, either.
For more discussion of this, please see my book, Rage Inside the Machine.