From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Jan 14 2001 - 11:33:52 MST
> John Marlow wrote:
> >
> > **I suggest to you that art WILL be superfluous to an
> > AI--and that anything which cannot fathom the value of
> > art is unsuited to make our decisions for us. (Okay,
> > maybe this is an eccentric POV; I think it's valid.
> > And to appreciate art, you need emotions. And an AI
> > with emotions is unsuitable to make our decisions for
> > us. And...)
If art is important to humanity - if humanity values it - then art is
necessarily something a Friendly AI cares about. Perhaps humanlike
emotions would be needed to personally feel the impact of art, but only
understanding of emotion is necessary to feel the impact of art on a
human. A Friendly superintelligence probably does not have humanlike
emotions, but should still be able to understand human emotions perfectly
- or alien emotions, for that matter.
Human understanding has two modes: "Simulate via abstract thought on the
highest level of the mind, using one thought per couple of seconds", and
"simulate via sympathy, using the full hardware power of the brain".
Abstract thought is too slow to let, for example, a blind human appreciate
the visual aspects of the Mona Lisa by simulating the human visual
cortex. A mature seed AI can wire up a simulation of the human visual
cortex on demand, even though it personally uses a high-tech 4D-capable
visual cortex that can directly notice changes of acceleration instead of
just changes of speed and changes of position.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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