Artificial entities or moral agents? How AI is changing human evolution

A large amount of theoretical and experimental research—from dynamic systems to computational neurosciences, from statistical learning to psychobiology of development—indicates that the encounter between Humans and very powerful AI will lead, in the near future, to organisms capable of going over the simulation of brain functions: hybrids that will learn from their internal states, will interpret the facts of reality, establish their goals, talk with humans and, especially, will decide according to their own ‘system of values’. Soon the traditional symbolic-formal domain could be overcome by the construction of systems with central control functions, with cognition similar to the biological brain. This requires a clarification on how they will act and, mostly, how they will decide. But what do we know today about decision-making processes and what is their relationship with the emotional spheres? If, traditionally, emotions were considered separate from the logical and rational thought, in recent years we have begun to understand that emotions have deep influence on human decisions. In this paper, we intend to show how emotions are crucial in moral decisions and that their understanding may help us to avoid mistakes in the construction of hybrid organisms capable of autonomous behavior.