[PhilosophyEvents] Colin Allen, "Appearance or Reality: Does AI Need Emotions?"

[Dan Hicks]

Colin Allen (UC Santa Barbara)
“Appearance or Reality: Does AI Need Emotions?”
UC Merced Philosophy Speaker Series
Friday, March 14, 2025
3:30-5pm SSM 116

Commercially available AI systems for the detection of sentiment or emotions from human faces, text, and non-verbal behavior are already widely deployed, even if they don’t fully live up to the marketing hype. At the same time, generative AI models are now capable of producing text and images that lead some people to attribute emotions to them. Such capacities are often argued to be important for effective human-machine interaction, but the actual limitations of current systems mean that their deployment comes with some hazards. Furthermore, these capacities do not amount to machines having their own emotions, a potential development that is regarded by some commentators as even more hazardous. Perhaps incrementally improving the capacities of machines to detect emotions and to appear to have them suffices for smooth human-machine interaction but a further question exists about whether human-level intelligence crucially depends on emotions, or whether it exists despite emotions. I will argue that the likely answer to this question is the former — emotions are crucial to intelligence — but answering this question definitively requires conceptual, theoretical, and experimental work at the interface of philosophy and cognitive science. I end by sketching the research program that this entails, and questioning the wisdom of pursuing such a research program.

This event is free and open to the public. If you’re a student at another school or community college faculty, contact Dan Hicks (danhicks at ucmerced.edu<mailto:danhicks at ucmerced.edu>) for directions and a parking subsidy.

Please note the location
[cid:01080446-50b7-4ad1-866d-bc5a587a7c0d at namprd06.prod.outlook.com]
-----
Dan Hicks
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Philosophy
University of California, Merced

Pronouns: they/them/their

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ucmerced.edu/pipermail/philosophyevents/attachments/20250305/b4465f98/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Colin Slide.png
Type: image/png
Size: 1378225 bytes
Desc: Colin Slide.png
URL: <http://lists.ucmerced.edu/pipermail/philosophyevents/attachments/20250305/b4465f98/attachment-0001.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Colin Allen Final.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 351749 bytes
Desc: Colin Allen Final.pdf
URL: <http://lists.ucmerced.edu/pipermail/philosophyevents/attachments/20250305/b4465f98/attachment-0001.pdf>