Human

Jürgen Schmidhuber introduced curiosity/boredom mechanisms as a way to improve learning in reinforcement learning environment:

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/curiositysab/curiositysab.h...

This mechanism can be formalized.

> Zero reinforcement should be given in case of perfect matches, high reinforcement should be given in case of `near-misses', and low reinforcement again should be given in case of strong mismatches. This corresponds to a notion from `esthetic information theory' which tries to explain the feeling of `beauty' by means of the quotient of `subjective complexity' and `subjective order' or the quotient of `unfamiliarity' and `familiarity' (measured in an information-theoretic manner).

This type of architecture is very similar to GAN which later became very successful

While this is interesting, gp's point still stand as the text explicitly says “There is no emotion” in the world of machines.

The language of reward mechanism can be translated to language of emotions. Emotions is something humans experience and understand on innate level, they are qualia. If a reward structure is translated to our language we can get a better intuitive understanding.

E.g. a direct negative reward associated with undesired states is often called "pain". E.g. if you want robot to avoid bumping into walls you give it a "pain" feedback and then it would learn to avoid walls. That's exactly how it works for humans, animals, etc. Obviously robot does not literally experience "pain" as an emotion, it's just a reward structure.

What you've written doesn't change anything to the fact that there's a contradiction in the author's writing. And as ithkuil said in another comment[1] it's not surprising at all that such a contradiction would occur in a work of fiction written by a human, because we are first an foremost emotional beings and we cannot really imagine how would a society of purely rational beings would be.

I don't really understand why you want to pretend that there's no inconsistency in a piece of fiction, by invoking pseudo-technical arguments that are entirely foreign to the said piece of fiction.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43992932

One way to interact with a piece of fiction is to find a way to connect it to things you know or thought of.