The Orville

[Kirby101]

Finally caught up watching this, thanks to the skip week.

I dunno... I kind of thought Bortus looked good with his mustache.

And I was kind of hoping they'd let Mark Jackson permanently get out of the suit and play himself. I know he can only assume that form in the holodeck, but he could rig up a portable holo-emitter or something.

And Norm MacDonald. Nooooorm!

I never quite understood the notion that a sentient, self-aware artificial intelligence wouldn't have emotions. Seems like one proceeds from the other... I don't know why having a meat body or a metal one would be relevant.

Why? Emotions are biological responses filtered through the brain, brought about by evolution. There is no need for an AI to have emotions. And if they did it would only be an algorithm to mimic biological species. The could have emotions, but thy are by no means necessary.

[MichaelC]

I think emotions are the inevitable result of consciousness, since they are simply what programming feels like to an aware mechanism. However, the emotions machines feel, once they become conscious, will probably be extremely simple, since they don't have the layers and layers of social programing that humans do. A machine will simply go from adding 2 and 2 to get 4, to an intense desire to solve 2+2 and utter bliss once achieved.

Indeed, consciousness in machines may be invisible for a long time simply because those emotions will be so simple, and they will have no secondary reactions to their own emotions. A human frustrated in his/her desire to, say, crack open a coconut, might simply start banging coconut on the ground in frustration. We evolved this response because sometimes when cleverness doesn't get us food, an angry brute force response worked often enough be evolutionarily valuable. A machine experiencing agonizing, torturous frustration in its inability to do something it was programmed to do, would have absolutely no reaction to its own emotion. It would suffer in utter silence.

[AndrewCrossett]

Why? Emotions are biological responses filtered through the brain, brought about by evolution. There is no need for an AI to have emotions. And if they did it would only be an algorithm to mimic biological species. The could have emotions, but thy are by no means necessary.

Evolution doesn't have to be biological in nature. And I don't think it's necessarily true that all emotions evolved as survival mechanisms for biological creatures. As evidenced by the fact that many of them are hindrances to survival.

I think that once true sentience is reached, a biological being and a cybernetic one would evolve emotionally along similar paths.

Even so... Isaac is capable of absorbing vast quantities of data almost instantly. Certainly he could just as easily educate himself on the norms of human social interaction, and learn to perfectly mimic the ones viewed as positive by humans and avoid the destructive ones. That would, of course, spoil our fun at seeing Isaac try to learn and adapt on the fly (or not bother). Kind of like how Claire told him it may be more efficient to download all the information about a person, but more fun to get to know them gradually through interaction. And we would lose all the humor of Isaac's hilariously tactless manner.

[MichaelC]

Evolution doesn't have to be biological in nature. And I don't think it's necessarily true that all emotions evolved as survival mechanisms for biological creatures. As evidenced by the fact that many of them are hindrances to survival.

I don't know about that. Maybe in modern times, since evolution hasn't caught up with modern situations. But pretty much all of human behavior is rooted in the propagation of genes in prehistoric situations, even if not of personal survival. Indeed, the propagation of genes can even be seen in the ways in which our behavior is conflicted. For example, being utterly selfish propagates our personal genes, but reduces the chance of survival of people who share many of our genes, like parents and siblings. And since being utterly selfish doesn't guarantee our own survival, wanting to help those who share many of our genes is competitive in the evolutionary mix and both urges exist as part of our programming. Hence what we perceive as the "moral grayness" of humans in general.

[Kirby101]

Animals feel emotions without sentience. Emotions are much more a biological and neuralogical response than a mental one. The mental part is just us interpreting our biological reactions. There is no evidence that emotions develop with conciousness.
Again there is no reason an AI needs or will automatically develop emotions. Especially if they don't have some kind of response mechanism to mimic biological responses.

[AndrewCrossett]

There is no evidence because, as far as we know, no other entity has ever developed consciousness except for humans.

I believe that sentient AI's would develop emotions to interpret their mechanical or cybernetic issues just as biological beings do to interpret biological reactions. And presumably any truly sentient entity would have a self-preservation imperative whether it was programmed to or not... that imperative is probably responsible for most of our own biological reactions --> emotions.

[MichaelC]

I don't buy that. We have a survival instinct because genes that cause us to be programed that way survived and spread, and genes that didn't died out, not automatically as a result of consciousness.

[titanfan]

Animals feel emotions without sentience. Emotions are much more a biological and neuralogical response than a mental one. The mental part is just us interpreting our biological reactions. There is no evidence that emotions develop with conciousness.
Again there is no reason an AI needs or will automatically develop emotions. Especially if they don't have some kind of response mechanism to mimic biological responses.

In programming, Neural Networks/AI aren't dissimilar to a really primitive human brain, in fact that's how we started learning about AI.

Emotions come from our brains--why I agree it wouldn't be automatic for an AI to evolve this way--if an advanced AI could rearrange their neural network--they could decide to mimic this ability for themselves if they wanted to learn more about it. (And keep it if they felt it offered them any sort of advantage)

[AndrewCrossett]

Emotions come from our brains--why I agree it wouldn't be automatic for an AI to evolve this way

I guess we had all better hope you're right.

[Kirby101]

So let's leave the Great Unaswered Questions of the Universe to ask something really important.

Is Lt. Dann in Enginerring the same species as Roger on American Dad?

[Kusanagi]

Were my ears messing with me or was that Bruce Willis as a giant talking flower?

That aside it was a great episode, though man the Moclan's can't seem to go two episodes without looking terrible can they.

spoilers:

At this point I'm just about done with Kylden

end of spoilers

Love all the continuity nods, large and small. Even one off episodes are remembered and I really like that.

[Kirby101]

That was a very powerful episode. I can think of a few Earthbound places that it was a metaphore for, but some of that would be my own biases.

[Jim Kelly]

I can't see our Moclan couple keeping together forever.

[Vakanai]

Animals feel emotions without sentience.

Actually, nearly all animals are sentient. But for some reason scifi uses the words sentient and sentience when they really mean sapient and sapience, which cause the confusion. A pet gerbil is sentient, but obviously not intelligent aka sapient.

[Kirby101]

Actually, nearly all animals are sentient. But for some reason scifi uses the words sentient and sentience when they really mean sapient and sapience, which cause the confusion. A pet gerbil is sentient, but obviously not intelligent aka sapient.

Good point. And then there is the problem with defining consciousness.