Sad robot: Expert says that robots could become so life-like that they will develop mental illnesses too

( Natural News ) It’s fair to say that our world has reached a point where technology is so advanced that robots are almost expected to be lifelike – but what about robots that develop mental illnesses, hallucinations and depression like human beings do? Is this just science fiction, or can we really expect artificial intelligence to grow even more similar to humans in the not-so-distant future? Back in March, New York University hosted a symposium in New York City called Canonical Computations in Brains and Machines, where a group of neuroscientists and experts in the field of artificial intelligence spoke about overlaps in the ways in which human beings and machines think and process information. According to one of these neuroscientists – Zachary Mainen of the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown – we might expect advanced machines to soon be able to experience some of the same mental problems that people do. “I’m drawing on the field of computational psychiatry, which assumes we can learn about a patient who’s depressed or hallucinating from studying AI algorithms like reinforcement learning. If you reverse the arrow, why wouldn’t an AI be subject to the sort of things that go wrong with patients?” Mainen said. The neuroscientist went on to explain that mental illnesses like depression and hallucinations depend on a chemical in the brain called serotonin, and if serotonin is being used to help intelligence systems solve a more general problem, “then machines might implement a similar function.” In other words, if serotonin can go wrong in humans, it could also go wrong inside of a machine. Get more news like this without being censored : Get the Natural News app for your mobile devices. Enjoy uncensored news, lab test results, videos, podcasts and more. Bypass all the unfair censorship […]

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