I motivate the systematic study of artificial affect by arguing that its possibility has significant intellectual, practical, and ethical implications. I argue the extant consciousness-centric approaches fail to address these implications, while behavioral approaches to AI sentience fail to address the inherent gaming problem in behavioral approaches to AI mentality. In place of these approaches, I propose a functional approach focusing on the roles that affective states play within a cognitive …
Read moreI motivate the systematic study of artificial affect by arguing that its possibility has significant intellectual, practical, and ethical implications. I argue the extant consciousness-centric approaches fail to address these implications, while behavioral approaches to AI sentience fail to address the inherent gaming problem in behavioral approaches to AI mentality. In place of these approaches, I propose a functional approach focusing on the roles that affective states play within a cognitive economy. I exemplify this approach with the case of bodily pain by examining its constituent sensory, evaluative, and motivational functions. This analysis establishes the tractability of a functional approach to artificial pain while also highlighting several outstanding questions that must be answered before we can settle the question whether artificial pain is possible in near-future AI systems.
