Brent Meeker writes:

> I agree with everything you say, and have long admired "The Hedonistic > Imperative". Motivation need not be linked to pain, and for that matter > it need not be linked to pleasure either. We can imagine an artificial > intelligence without any emotions but completely dedicated to the > pursuit of whatever goals it has been set. It is just a contingent fact > of evolution that we can experience pleasure and pain.

I don't know how you can be sure of that.  How do you know that being 
completely dedicated is not the same has having a motivating emotion?

My computer is completely dedicated to sending this email when I click on "send". Surely you don't think it gets pleasure out of sending it and suffers if something goes wrong and it can't send it? Even humans do some things almost dispassionately (only almost, because we can't completely eliminate our emotions) out of a sense of duty, with no particular feeling about it beyond this. I don't even think my computer has a sense of duty, but this is something like the emotionless motivation I imagine AI's might have. I'd sooner trust an AI with a matter-of-fact sense of duty to complete a task than a human motivated by desire to please, desire to do what is good and avoid what is bad, fear of failure and humiliation, and so on. Just because evolution came up with something does not mean it is the best or most efficient way of doing things.
Stathis Papaioannou
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