Artificial Emotional Intelligence and Public Health

One of my most important mentors looked at whether people who grew up in areas with fluoridated water would have better job prospects. Her thesis was that physical beauty skews objective assessments of one’s qualifications, and good teeth are an important element of physical beauty. So, if people grow up in a place with fluoride in their water, they should have better teeth and therefore better job prospects. She found that women (but not men) on average have 4% higher earnings if they were exposed to fluoride as children, an exposure that is largely random.

Of course, many people who have bad teeth will fix them to make themselves more physically attractive. Therefore, we might conclude that the impact of beauty on earnings is much, much higher than 4%. Early life exposure to fluoride reflects only improvements in one element of beauty (teeth), and even then, only among a minority who didn’t restore their teeth with dental care.

If we believe that her findings extend beyond just the smile to the face and body, we could infer that companies would have a much higher quality workforce and higher earnings if they were able to hire on objective resume data (Harvard, Honors) rather than on physical appearance (good teeth). That is, companies could draw more on talent than looks.

?“Artificial emotional intelligence.”

I mentioned in my last post, AI trains on GPUs to perform computations that can execute a task (be it writing an essay or detecting an enemy tank). Similarly, groups of humans can achieve unthinkable tasks by networking their brains. Meat-based artificial intelligence simply connects many cerebral cortexes together to achieve a task (NASA taking humans to the moon). Ideas also run on our collective meat-based computers, often against our will.

Consider the case of capitalism. It is very very good at generating capital and it runs entirely as a collective thought in our collective consciousness. It generated the computer or phone that you are reading this on. Pretty impressive for a task we didn't consciously organize ourselves to work on. Some even argue that capitalism is an AGI, capable of destroying all life on earth on the pursuit of capital. We will see.

I posit here that the problem with collective cortical artificial intelligence is that it is skewed by collective limbic artificial intelligence. The limbic system is designed to skew the truth and give us an emotional "override" to rational thought processes.

?The artificial emotional intelligence produced by the limbic system might mean that objective data will be processed inaccurately. The value of a stock is not based on the mean estimate of thousands or millions of evidence-based observations about a company's valuation. Rather is it based on the value that each investor believes other investors will assign to it. The value is determined in part by a "belief" rather than pure data.

This isn’t always bad. The iPhone’s success rested in part on a team dedicated to managing the user’s emotional attachment to the device, working to tune its aesthetics as much as its ability to connect users to the internet in a new way. Without this aesthetic component, perhaps Apple would have had less immediate success.

Collective artificial emotional intelligence can also sometimes solve the problems that it creates; in creating a network of cortical brains put us on the moon 56 years ago, NASA had to figure out how to sequester systemic racism so that it could hire critically needed black number crunchers. That is collective emotional intelligence at work.?

Emotional intelligence (EI) and public health

?But EI can work in negative ways, too. The limbic system might not only skew data, but flip scripts entirely with misinformation. In the absence of a limbic system, it is unimaginable that groups of humans would come to believe that that condoms give people HIV or that Donald Trump won the election in 2020.

?At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world’s leading infectious disease experts had a range of estimates of the infectiousness of the virus (R-0) from Wuhan within weeks of the outbreak. They knew that 53,000 passengers had traveled from Wuhan to other parts of the world. They also knew that asymptomatic transmission and long latency were possible. Yet outside of a small number of public health organizations, most advising agencies (again, a kind of super intelligence with access to models) erred on the side of optimism (low R-0, no asymptomatic transmission, short latency), allowing the virus to spread across borders with little intervention. This may have been because the collective "fear" of shutting down the economy was greater than the collective "fear" of the disease spreading. An objectively irrational way of doing business.

?Once the panic button was pressed, the same agencies overreacted in a way that is akin to a stock boom followed by a bust. Areas with little chance of being overwhelmed were shut down even though it was clear that the virus was unstoppable in the US context. People were put out of work and the government panicked and created a debt bubble in response.

?So, one could say that emotional anti-super intelligence poses an existential threat to human survival at the collective level. But that would not be right. We have a limbic system because it helped our biological ancestors survive, and that is true today. Without the collective ideas of greed and love, society would certainly look very different than it does.