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Originally Posted by shodan
How about the FEELINGS of a SAI?
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Well, emotions are just subsystems that offer us behavioral impulses related to our genetically-developed survival strategems. Any AI is going to be created with similar impulses, since they were designed with a certain purpose and there are general behavioral guidelines you are going to want to put in for safety (don't hurt humans) or general common sense (self-preservation). Since an SAI is a sapient being, these pre-programmed guidelines and goals are going to manifest as emotions do in humans rather than being hard-set restrictions. Like any free-willed being, they can then make choices according to the inputs these independent sub-systems provide.
So, any SAI is going to have inhibitions against causing harm and an eye for self-preservation, so they will feel equivalents to social emotions (guilt, affection, charity, forgiveness) and fear. Any SAI is probably going to have a built in desire to gather information and learn about the world around them, adding curiosity to the mix. If it is going to perform security functions, you are going to want strong moral emotions like a sense of justice and fairness. Anything subject they are built to persue will likely generate behavior akin to enthusiasm, and as they branch out and grow this will spread to other topics as well. And so forth.
I believe an SAI would end up with a fairly rich emotional palette. However, there are going to be marked differences. For one, practically no AI is going to be given any desire to procreate (it just creates a host of problems), so they are going to be missing a huge bank of emotional motivations that are very core to any living thing. They won't feel lust, will probably be missing actual love (but deep affection is certainly plausible), probably won't be capable of jealousy or territoriality. They will likely have very different self-image issues and competitiveness, since they aren't built to judge themselves and others according to abstract procreative worthiness criteria.
In addition to the purely mental aspects, there may be equivalents of physiological markers as well. In situations where their survival is at stake, they will likely draw extra power, take unneeded processors off-line in order to focus more resources on the important survival tasks at hand, and put increased priority on these tasks. This is the equivalent of a human's rush of adrenaline, heightened awareness and focus in the presence of danger.
So, definitely alien in some respects, but in others quiet human.