Connectionists: New book on AI and human suffering

[Aapo Hyvärinen]

Dear All,

I'm happy to announce that my new book is now available on arxiv at 
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.15409 :

Title: "Painful intelligence: What AI can tell us about human suffering"

Abstract:

This book uses the modern theory of artificial intelligence (AI) to 
understand human suffering or mental pain. Both humans and sophisticated 
AI agents process information about the world in order to achieve goals 
and obtain rewards, which is why AI can be used as a model of the human 
brain and mind. This book intends to make the theory accessible to a 
relatively general audience, requiring only some relevant scientific 
background.

The book starts with the assumption that suffering is mainly caused by 
frustration. Frustration means the failure of an agent (whether AI or 
human) to achieve a goal or a reward it wanted or expected. Frustration 
is inevitable because of the overwhelming complexity of the world, 
limited computational resources, and scarcity of good data. In 
particular, such limitations imply that an agent acting in the real 
world must cope with uncontrollability, unpredictability, and 
uncertainty, which all lead to frustration.

Fundamental in such modelling is the idea of learning, or adaptation to 
the environment. While AI uses machine learning, humans and animals 
adapt by a combination of evolutionary mechanisms and ordinary learning. 
Even frustration is fundamentally an error signal that the system uses 
for learning. This book explores various aspects and limitations of 
learning algorithms and their implications regarding suffering.

At the end of the book, the computational theory is used to derive 
various interventions or training methods that will reduce suffering in 
humans. The amount of frustration is expressed by a simple equation 
which indicates how it can be reduced. The ensuing interventions are 
very similar to those proposed by Buddhist and Stoic philosophy, and 
include mindfulness meditation. Therefore, this book can be interpreted 
as an exposition of a computational theory justifying why such 
philosophies and meditation reduce human suffering.


Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.15409


Aapo Hyvärinen

Professor of Computer Science
University of Helsinki