When I first saw Spock(played by Leonard Nimoy) in Star Trek, I thought he and Vulcans in general would be the future of humanity. No emotions and just running on pure logic. At the time, it seems to be the logical flow of evolution if we were to continue into the future as a species.
About a decade later, I realize we wouldn’t have evolved with emotions if it weren’t logical. A few more decades after that, I now propose why.
The brain has been influenced for most of it’s evolutionary development by scarcity. Resources are hard to come by. It takes effort to find and acquire them. It has been imperative therefore to save energy. As some might notice, parts of the body that are in regular use are maintained while those that are not get downgraded. For instance, melanin production requires more energy than not producing them so those who have less sun exposure generally have lighter skin tone. Thus, energy can be used for something else or be saved as fat for use at another time.
How does emotion fit into this narrative? I believe it is another energy saving mechanism whereby the brain is relegating some functions to areas that use less computational resources. Somewhere between functions that we don’t consciously think about like regulating hormones and conscious decision making like where to hunt. Emotions require more nuance to be completely automatic or involuntary but for the most part of human existence was safe enough to have less intensive cognitive resource allocation.
As our technological development have outpaced evolution in fairly recent times, the perception of being ‘emotional’ as being irrational has taken hold. If taken into context of our species' environment throughout most of its existence, this perception may not hold water.
With this in mind, I believe AI development can also be patterned as such. Instead of having one kind of neural network for a system that does many complex decisions, perhaps we could have many kinds of networks with different levels of sophistication that is coordinating and working together via a central corpus. These levels of sophistication can be anywhere from different numbers of hidden layers to offloading tasks offsite to a data center instead of onboard a mobile unit. For instance, in a self driving car, emergency braking decisions have the highest priority and therefor should have the most bandwidth and be made onboard. But dynamic route planning can perhaps be offloaded to company facilities that can perform the task with less energy in a central location and save energy on board the vehicle at the same time.
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