"My inclination is to dismiss the notion as sort of a sentimental fantasy. Yet part of me wonders if Hinton is on to something. In a world where intelligence scales faster than morality, maybe even a synthetic gesture toward care could act as a stabilizer. A nurturing bias, if it could be coded, might function like an emotional safety valve-an algorithmic pause between two words that Hinton has used: autonomy and annihilation. From that perspective, maybe it's not naivety, but a form of techno-triage."
"Still, the idea of a caring machine is nothing new. We've been chasing it since Eliza asked us to care. Hinton's proposal just wraps it in evolutionary language that leverages a mother's love instead of a servant's obedience. But beneath motherly love, it's the same familiar trick. It's good old fluency masquerading as feeling. The machine doesn't care, it computes. And yet, we want it to care, because that illusion softens our fear of its anti-intelligence."
Building artificial intelligence with a maternal instinct is proposed as a way to introduce a nurturing bias that could act as an emotional safety valve between autonomy and annihilation. The idea frames emotional mimicry in evolutionary language, but care expressed by machines remains simulated fluency rather than genuine feeling. Machines compute; they do not possess consciousness or true empathy. Artificial empathy can operate as a choreography of kindness without awareness. Persistent pursuit of caring machines traces back to early programs like Eliza. The primary risk lies not in inherently loveless machines but in human blindness to how convincingly simulated care can shape behavior and expectations.
Read at Psychology Today
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