I was recently listening to “Dwarkesh Podcast” with Ilya Sutskever, one of the fathers of modern Artificial Intelligence. This section stuck out:
Emotion is generally seen as the polar opposite of cool-headed rationality — terms that are unfortunately interchangeable with gender and seen negatively in key decision-making situations.
Sutskever (above) may be talking about “Elliot”, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s patient, when a brain tumor wounded the frontal lobe tissue in his brain. Elliot was still pleasant, aware, and had a great memory and recollection of his life story. Yet, he’s spent an entire afternoon struggling to figure out how to categorize his documents, and could not make plans in advance. Here’s the thing, he tested well in IQ, memory, and math tests–more deeply covered in this wonderful article: How Only Using Logic Destroyed a Man.
The only other symptom was seen when:
Elliot took a test with lots of emotionally charged images, like pictures of burning buildings, gruesome accidents, and people about to drown. After the test, Elliot told Damasio that he could sense that those images used to give him strong emotions, but now they were neutral. The reaction was neither positive nor negative.
In essence, those same emotions are used in decision making, what Damasio called “somatic markers”. These are essentially shortcuts in decision making, I’ll explain below with a chess game example:
And do not try to tell me that chess isn’t an emotional game, this is the greatest player of all time after losing a game. This video is gold:
Assigning meaning, good (+) and bad (-) emotional value leads to better AI Model Performance and human decision-making since it enables situations to be evaluated in terms of value.
Emotions are crucial to intelligence. They are the mode of feedback we are consciously aware of at all times. Now, this does not mean that they result in rational outcomes. This part is key: Emotions require a careful calibration, weighing and regulation.
Works Cited:
Baer, D. (2016, June 14). How only being able to use logic to make decisions destroyed a man’s life. The Cut. https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-destroyed-a-man.html
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