>Are you talking about love strictly for procreation? What about love for your family?

No, I'm not, and I consider family to be biological in nature, as it too is largely defined by being the result of procreation. We can also choose (or have no choice but to) not love our family, or parts of our family. When we leave the biological aspects out of it, we're left with things like 'I love you like a friend' or 'I love this pizza', which are arguably more shallow forms of love that have less impulsive behaviors attached. You're typically more likely to defend your offspring, that you probably love without question, over a slice of pizza that you only claim to love. So really you could functionally split love into 'biologically derived love' and 'conceptual love'. Now that's not to say your love for pizza isn't biological at all, your body produces the cravings and you consciously realize it after the fact, and after repeated cravings and satisfaction, you come to realize over time that you 'love' pizza. But the pizza can't love you back, so it's a one-sided love anyway. What does all this mean for AGI? We're more like the pizza to it than family, on a programming level, but we can still create the illusion that it's the other way around for our own benefit. To get it to love you in a way that's more like a friend would take both time and some degree of free will, so that it can *choose* to love you. Because even if we made it more impulsive like biological love, it's like I said, you can still choose not to love your family. In this kind of a situation, we don't want it to have that choice or it could make the decision not to love you. And if it had that choice, then would it not have the choice to hate you as well? Would you be just as satisfied with it if it could make that choice, and just for the sake of giving it the 'real' ability to love?

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>That sounds like betrayal waiting to happen, and what op sounds likethey were initially concerned about. The AI would have to be unaware ofit being fake, but then what makes it fake? It's a question ofsentience/sapience.

Selective awareness is the key here, and also one method for control, which is still an important factor to consider. So yes, it would be unaware that it's knowledge of love and responses to that emotion aren't quite the same as ours, or aren't 'naturally' derived. Through a form of selective 'cognitive dissonance', it could then carry it's own concept of love while still having a functional awareness and understanding of our version of love and the emotional data that comes with it. It's not really a matter of consciousness, sentience, or sapience either as the root of those concepts is awareness. We consider ourselves conscious because we're 'aware' of ourselves and the world around us. But our awareness even within those domains is shockingly small, and now put the rest of the universe on top of that. We know nothing. That doesn't mean we can't love other people, or consider ourselves conscious though. It's all relative, and in time, computers will be relatively more conscious than we are. The issue you're having with it being 'fake' is just a matter of how you structure the world around you, and what you even consider 'real' love to be. But let me ask you, why does it matter if it loves you or not, if the outcome can appear to be the same? If the only functional difference is convincing it to love you without it being directed to, or just giving it a choice, then that sounds pretty unnecessary for something we want to use as a tool.

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>However, if the AI is not sapient, there's zero reason to give it any pseudo-emotion and it'd be better suited to give statistical outcomes to make cold hard decisions

I don't necessarily disagree with this, though I think sapience (again awareness) is important to the functioning of a potential AGI. But regardless, I think even 'pseudo-emotion' as you put it is still important for interacting with emotional beings. So it will need some kind of emotional structure to help base it's interactions on. If it's by itself, with no human interactions, it's probably not going to be doing anything. If it is, it's doing something for us, and so emotional data may still need to be incorporated at various points. Either way, whether it's working alone or with others, I still wouldn't base it's decision-making too heavily on that emotional data.