AI doesn’t understand pain. Human beings are programmed through pain. Through the pain of our own experiences, and through learning about and empathising with the pain of others.
The child learns quickly that the fire is hot — not conceptually or through repeated exposure to the codex of written knowledge, but through an imprint on their bodily senses and neurological physiology.
When you hear a speaker share their story of personal suffering, grief, and possible triumph over adversity, the audience literally feels that same series of emotions — if only for a few moments.
When you read a book, filled with lived experiences, your mind soaks up the wisdom and the lessons learned, in order to best navigate your own life — should you face similar challenges.
When you watch a movie, the hero’s journey is compelling; not because it is a work of imagination, but because we can willingly suspend disbelief to ‘be’ the character and ‘feel’ their situation.
Will AI ever empathise the way another human or animal does?
No.
Not unless we program it to feel or experience something like the pain we all experience in our own lives.
Machine Learning can find a way to win, to solve, to create. It can hallucinate a pretty convincing story. It can wrap that story in a face that presents with the attributes of emotion. It can mimic the voice of an artist. AI generates outcomes and numbers; 1’s and 0’s. It spews facts, but it doesn’t care about the person it is interacting with.
It is already far superior to us in the mathematical, scientific, lingual and visual realms.
Yet, underneath all of this, we each have a fundamental knowledge that the machine has not ‘felt’. That the machine is impervious to pain.
In the emotional realm, the machine still knows absolutely nothing.
