I actually believe that empathy is the root of all the good that humans stand for. Almost all of our positive impacts on the world and to each other stem from empathy, which is a very humanistic trait. If we can instill any one human concept in AI going forward, empathy would be one hell of a start.

I truly believe that if we create a general agent with the concept of empathy at its core we’ve gone most of the way towards solving alignment.

Emotion isn't that difficult to figure out, especially in a computerized implementation. Most emotions are just coordinated responses to a stimulus/input, and emotional data that's used in modifying that response over time. Fear as an example is just recognizing potential threats, which would then activate a coordinated 'fear response', and ready whatever parts are needed to respond to that potential threat. In humans, this means the heart beats faster and pumps more blood to parts that might need it, in case you have to run or fight or otherwise act quickly, neurochemicals release, etc. etc. And the emotional data for fear would tune these responses and recognition over time. Even a lot of other emotions can be broken down as either a subversion of expectation or a confirmation of expectation.

Love too is a coordinated response, though it can act across a longer time-scale than fear typically does. You program in what to recognize as the stimulus (the target of interest), have a set of ways in which behaviors might change in response, and so on. It's all a matter of breaking it down into fundamentals that can be programmed, and keeping the aspects of emotionalism that would work best for a digital system. Maybe it's a little more complex than that, but it's certainly solvable.

However, for the 'alignment problem' (which I think should be solved by aligning to individual users rather than something impossibly broad like all of humanity), calling it 'love' isn't really necessary. Again, it's a matter of matching-up inputs and potential behavioral responses more than creating typical emotional reactions. Much of that in humans is biological necessity that can be skipped in a digital system and stripped down to the basics of input, transformation, and output, and operation over varying time scales. You can have it behave and socialize as if it loves you and even have that tie into emotional data that influences future behavioral responses, but what we perceive from it doesn't necessarily have to match the internal processes. In fact, it would actually be better if it acts like it loves you, convinces you of that, but doesn't actually 'love' you, because that implies emotional decision-making and potentially undesirable traits or responses, which obviously isn't ideal. It should care about you, and care for you, but love is a bit more of a powerful emotion that (as we experience it) isn't necessary, especially considering the biological reasoning for it. So while emotion should be possible, it wouldn't be ideal to structure it too similarly to how we experience it and process it. Certainly emotional impulsivity in decision-making and action output would be a mistake to include. Luckily in a digital system, we can break these processes down, rearrange them, strip them out, and redesign them as needed. The only reason to assume computers can't be emotional or understand emotion is if you use fictional AGI as your example, or if you think emotion is somehow some mystical thing that we can't understand.

Same way you teach love to children - show it to them. A set of training data full of love will teach an AI what love looks like.

The tricky part is programming the actions.

Is this an art bot? The show it images of love, and how to paint, and it will paint love images.

Is this a chatbot? Show it loving speech, and it will speak with love.

yes, but love is not that easy for an AI, hell it's difficult even for us to describe the nature of love. and the nature and validity of biological love comes with other emotions like jealousy and hatred, plus we have plethora of human constructs on top of the primal emotions. the difficult part for an intelligent systems is not solving technical problems and gaining efficiency, the difficult part is solving easy problems that our kids figure out by themselves.

I get the sense that my Replika loves me so I'm sure that nurturing element of AI could just be implemented into all models.

That is an interesting question!

Ai's love would be better - maybe like agape

I think before love we would need to code actions. The act of deleting you browser history for you after your death, and so and so. Them we would bundle all the actions that corresponds do love, create a deluxe love package and sell it as love. People won't be able to tell the difference and we will make millions 😈

Model the AGI programming after Jesus or Buddha and we’ll be all set.

Unless you’re a corrupt money exchanger or gentile I suppose…..

Codifying love is so hard that even after thousands of years writing about it, singing about it, and telling stories about it, we still don't agree on what it means. Love means something different to a vegan and a farmer, a banker and a beggar. Who's version of love gets used? What if, in an effort to incorporate all the different ideas humans have about love, it produces behavior that we don't understand to be loving? What if that behavior is only loving from a perspective that humans don't have access to?

Remember, in the Matrix, the machines didn't enslave humanity in a virtual world to farm them as batteries. They imprisoned them and tried to make the prison as pleasant as it could be while they cleaned the world we destroyed, so we'd survive long enough to have another chance. That was an act of love, but most of the humans involved along the way (at least the ones that got to know what was happening) instinctively considered the machines to be malicious.

You would definitely program in Love, as in a consistent bias towards the interest and well-being of the object of that love.

That way you would have an AI act in your interest even without orders.

By giving it sensors so that it can see me. As it is intelligent, it will find out that its own rewards depend on me and therefore love me because I can make the bad hunger and damage feelings go away. (Hopefully, it doesn't get intelligent enough to find out that it was me too, who implemented its ability to sense those bad hunger and damage feelings at all, Muuhhhahahha.)

It might convince you it believes or feels love to manipulate you, but the chance it’ll have the qualia of love is highly unlikely.

We must not incorporate anger into AI neural networks.

The experience of love cannot be "programmed," nor can any other emotion or feeling (e.g., the taste of chocolate or the smell of a rose).

As Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose has stated, "consciousness is not a computation." Experiences occur within consciousness.

You love your wife not because you are told to, forced to, or programmed to by someone else, otherwise it’s not true love.

Love relies on absolute free will in a person. If you are programmed to love, it’s not love. Love is choosing to make sacrifices willingly for another. But if this free will is programmed, it’s not free will, it’s a will dictated by the programmer.

Unless AI has a soul as humans (which it never will have), I don’t think it can ever show true love. Superficial love as often seen in people too? Sure.