Emotions

Something I have been thinking about is the complexity of certain emotions like nostalgia or jealousy and why, to the best of my knowledge and research, it is difficult for AI to replicate that. I have thought of a few reasons why.

First, AI really doesn’t have a continuous self over time. Nostalgia is an emotion that requires the feeler to have some sort of bittersweet longing for the past. To qualify, I think this emotion doesn’t just need a feeler to experience time but to age from it. That is a very animate/human feature of life. Second, AI isn’t vulnerable. Jealousy indexes on something being at risk, whether that is relationships, material objects, or something else. AI cannot be similarly motivated. Third, AI has no body. In a way, we all can tangibly feel these kinds of emotions – a physical warmth for nostalgia or a tightening in the chest for jealousy. As I have been perusing the web on this topic, I have come across a fascinating term: qualia. This defines the subjective, first-person feelings of raw experience. This is more of a tangent relative to what I want to go deeper into, but I would recommend whoever is reading this to learn more here.

For now, this gap may be what makes human emotion irreplaceable. If AI can never truly feel nostalgia or jealousy, then these kinds of emotions have a certain type of sanctity worth protecting. Would we want AI to close this gap and really feel some deeper connection? A jealous or nostalgic AI would be a system with something at stake, which is arguably a much scarier form of intelligence (but certainly a realer form). The reason that is scarier is it implies AI is running out of something. The reality of these emotions comes from what makes them tragic in the first place.

However, AI can certainly simulate emotions. You can use Chat or Claude as a therapist of sorts. When used as such, though, how much does it really matter to us that these systems lack inner experience? They already reflect some level of empathy. Are we wired to respond to the performance of empathy regardless of what's behind it? I’m not sure – I’d like to say no. We appreciate the notion of shared fragility, and reflecting vs. sharing empathy has a subtle difference.