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Yann LeCun,Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, has made a bold, or rather provocative, prediction: future AI systems will possess emotions. In a recent interview, LeCun explained that emotions are an “inseparable component” of the design of advanced AI systems.
“So the blueprint of AI systems that we’re envisioning, that we’re going to build over the next few years — those AI systems will have emotions. It’s a basically inseparable component of the design of those systems,” he said while responding to a question at an interview.
He argues that emotions are a natural consequence of AI agents being driven by objectives and goals.
“Why would they have emotions? Because they will be driven by objectives,” LeCun explained. “You give them a goal that they have to accomplish, a task, and their purpose is to accomplish this task, subject to guardrails that are hardwired into their design,” he added.
“And for them to do this, they need a number of components. The first component they need is a way to determine whether this goal that we give them was accomplished or not. And what they also need is what we call a world model. What is a world model is something that we all have — a prefrontal cortex that allows us to imagine what the consequences of our actions. And it’s what allows us to plan a sequence of actions to accomplish a particular goal. Now if you have this ability to predict ahead of time what a sequence of action is going to produce, then you can predict whether a goal is going to be satisfied or not. And you can predict if the outcome is going to be good or bad,” LeCun added.
LeCun believes that this ability to predict and react to potential outcomes will give rise to emotions in AI.
“If you predict it’s going to be bad, you feel fear. If you predict it’s going to be good, it’s more like elation, right? So, (you’ll need) the ability to predict, and then to act so as to accomplish those predictions (which) produces the equivalent of emotions. So AI systems that are smart enough, that are capable of reasoning and planning, will have emotions,” he explained.