Artificial Stupidity

• Affect in Artificial Intelligence by David Kewley, 3/28/98
  
  

How refreshing to learn that someone from your world of computer science has found our site. I've been trying to forge links with the AI world for years to no avail. Until recently no one was interested in affect, taking emotion only as something that interfered with neocortical cognition. I have pointed out over and over that it would be relatively easy to build a computational system that varied the gradients and densities of input to resemble the conditions of stimulus increase, stimulus decrease, and stimulus level that we believe to be the evolved triggers for innate affect. Our central concept that innate affect is an analogic amplifier of its stimulus conditions surely cries out for involvement with the world of computational science.

Tomkins had a good relationship with people from IBM, but aside from a couple of initially encouraging seminars, nothing happened. (Often, the great corporations will invite what they call "thought leaders" to deliver inspiring sermons, after which everybody goes back to work unchanged. The seminars seem dedicated to the validation of corporate vanity rather than the future of research; I've given a few for the pharmaceutical industry with similar success.) Students from the MIT Media Lab regularly check in with us, comment on the applicability of our ideas to their work, and then disappear.

Early on, I tried to say to the Artificial Intelligence group that humans do not work like their machines, which have been developed in terms of the imaginal lives of the AI scientists. (Years ago Robert Stoller and I discussed the structure of pornographic movies, which he believed to reflect not the sexual fantasy lives of the average adult but that of what he described as the "Mafia types" who provided the funding for the overwhelming majority of such films.) The cue to the understanding of human intelligence is the analysis of our response to failure, which always triggers affect. It is for this reason that I have suggested that the proper subject for our mutual research would be Artificial Stupidity. Until now, however, my suggestions have triggered the kind of affect that makes the AI community veer away from us.

The findings of Warren Meck and others who study subcortical timing mechanisms (as described in the post above) offer the first hard evidence for the mechanisms Tomkins postulated 40 years ago. I remain confident that the overwhelming majority of his theories for cognition and affect will turn out to be correct, requiring the confluence of streams of thought previously considered incompatible.

Again, welcome to our group. We look forward to your involvement at any level, and hope you will continue to favor us with your comments and ideas.

• Building a model of innate affect by David Kewley, 3/28/98
  • Stimulus Density by Don Nathanson, 3/28/98
    • References? by David Kewley, 3/29/98
      • Further connections by Don Nathanson, 3/29/98
  • Late to this discussion but.. by mark@emotivate.com, 2/8/99