Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

The history-of-psychology content here is fascinating - it's hard to overstate the harm done by Ekman's theory to everything from police investigations to Pysch 101 textbooks. But the attempt to tie AI into all of this is weirdly presumptuous. It assumes that the progress of AI development is predicated on psychology theory without supporting that claim in any way. The rebuttal is painfully obvious: children learn to read emotions without some grand backing theory, so why do we assume AI will need one to reach human levels?

It ought to be telling that this is a piece about AI written by a historian, citing a psychologist, a historian, and a fictional philosopher - but not a single person with an AI or even computing background. The result is a painfully slow and sloppy retreading of existing ideas. First p-zombies and then the Chinese Room question are sketched out without any reference to that original work, ending with a question-begging assertion that perfect imitation of an emotion is meaningfully different from feeling the emotion.

The first article in the series, grandly titled Silicon Valley Thinks Everyone Feels the Same Six Emotions, is even worse. It critiques Ekman and his work with the TSA, then talks about Alexa, but offers no evidence at all that Alexa or any other Valley project involves Ekman's six-emotion model. (Anyone with a cursory knowledge of machine learning will tell you that it almost certainly doesn't. Reducing inputs down to six artificial categories is not the sort of thing that improves training.)

Given all of that, the parting shot of this piece is especially galling. After indicating total unfamiliarity with AI theory, AI ethics, and post-1970 philosophy in general, the author blithely declares: "if I were contemplating a career in philosophy right now, I’d be thinking about making my central field the ethics of emotion AI. There’s much to be done."

Children learn to read emotion using a brain that evolved to do so over millions of years

Yes, and children experience emotions before they learn to reason or use language, so they have a personal basis to work from when learning to reason about the emotions of others.

"Empathy" is the name of the reasoning process by which children analyze the experience of their own emotions and behaviors, to draw inferences about the emotional state of others based on observing their behaviors.

But long before that, they are reacting emotionally to the behaviors of others. For example, you can scare a baby.

The scale of the learning is interesting in itself. From a few months, to years old, to all the way to preteens, emotions are constantly being reevaluated and developing new ones as well.

Is there any decent model of what actually happens when children develop theory of mind?

Along with having a suite of emotions and recognizing cues in others, it's pretty obviously a required piece of learning to read emotion for humans. Below a certain age, it's literally impossible to generate ideas like "the cat doesn't like that", since there's no space between "I like that" and "that is likable". But I don't think I've ever seen somebody describe what kind of structural or chemical changes are correlated with e.g. passing the mirror test.

From what I remember, when children are born, they're born with a very underdeveloped brain. The prefrontal cortex to I believe isn't present but I could be wrong, otherwise it's very small.

The self conscious emotions, pride, shame, guilt, envy, remorse, embarrassment, hubris, and many more come from the prefrontal cortex. As it develops over a very long period of time, so do the emotions. I remember that embarrassment doesn't typically develop until you're approximately 7-years-old.

I don't remember many models besides: here's a brain, here's how it developed, and here's what is and isn't able to get done given approximate ages.

True, and I don't mean to underplay the difficulty of that style of learning. In particular, it seems important that our emotion-reading is reflexive - we learn to map other people's expressions to our emotions, and it's not clear how similar a learning process without some reference class of emotions.

(We have a decent example in autism of how emotion without instinctive mirroring plays out in learning emotional signals. The associations are learned consciously, which works out alright. But I'm not sure there's any precedent for people who have mirroring but nonexistent emotions. Is there something like abulia for lack of emotion? ...is it abulia?)

I'm going to stand by the original statement, though. We have proof that this sort of learning without a backing theory can be done, and no real evidence that having a general theory would make it easier to actually learn the specific associations needed to make predictions. To steal an example from the article: knowing whether the six-emotion model is right or wrong doesn't automatically help us recognize a clenched fist as threat or celebration, and fretting about the impact of psych textbooks on AI without proposing an actual connection isn't particularly compelling.

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