This post is a brief comment on PJ Manney's interesting essay,
http://www.pj-manney.com/empathy.html Her point (among others) is that, in humans, storytelling is closely tied with empathy, and is a way of building empathic feelings and relationships. Mirror neurons and other related mechanisms are invoked. I basically agree with all this. However, I would add that among AI's with a nonhuman cognitive architecture, this correlation need not be the case. Humans are built so that among humans storytelling helps build empathy. OTOH, for an AI storytelling might not increase empathy one whit. It is interesting to think specifically about the architectural requirements that "having storytelling increase empathy" may place on an AI system. For example, to encourage the storytelling/empathy connection to exist in an AI system, one might want to give the system an explicit cognitive process of hypothetically "putting itself in someone else's place." So, when it hears a story about character X, it creates internally a fabricated story in which it takes the place of character X. There is no reason to think this kind of strategy would come naturally to an AI, particularly given its intrinsic dissimilarity to humans. But there is also no reason that kind of strategy couldn't be forced, with the impact of causing the system to understand humans better than it might otherwise. -- Ben G ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=11983
