> artificial intelligence has an edge over the natural kind because of the inherent emotional and psychological weaknesses that encumber human reasoning.
It's Mr Spock's problem. He always produced inferior decisions because he failed to take into account the emotions of others.
The Mr Spock's problem is fictional, designed to make for an interesting plot, not to reflect reality.
For example, in humans, an innate lack of empathy (the ability to feel the emotions of others) and being unemotional yourself are factors correlated with being a better, more effective detector of emotions and manipulator of emotions; taking into account the emotions of others can be done better if its done in an analytical way (however, it requires attention, it's not an "always active" skill then), and lack of emotionality allows you to express the emotion that's most beneficial for your goals in current situation instead of whatever you actually think.
If anything, a realistic advanced AI / Spock should be expected to have the communication skills of a good hostage negotiator combined with a charismatic politician combined with a wise psychotherapist combined with a sleazy car salesman. Having and feeling emotions is not required to understand them in others and show them yourself. For normal humans (excepting e.g. some cases of sociopathy) it's hard to fake emotions because we're evolved to have emotional expressions as a somewhat trustworthy, hard to fake signal; it's a limitation built in homo sapiens, not an inherent limitation.
Oh, I know that well. I just find it amusing. Spock is actually the most illogical character in the show, and the most emotional.
I'm not convinced this is intentional on the part of the scriptwriters. For example, how does a scriptwriter write a character who is more intelligent than the writer is? Most "advanced intellects" in scifi seem remarkably average in their intelligence, reflecting the intelligence of the writer.
This is in the context of a certain work of Harry Potter fanfiction, but you may find this set of notes for how to write intelligent characters interesting. I specifically direct your attention towards the section "Level 2 intelligent characters", which goes into how to write a character that appears smarter than the author.
Also on Spock in particular, there's a good talk by Julia Galef, The Straw Vulcan, about how irrational Spock really is and what a rational Vulcan should look like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv1nMc-k0N4
It seems that both of my observations are well-trod territory!
Anyhow, the book "Brainwave" by Poul Anderson has the best description of what more intelligent characters would be like - they spoke with fewer words, as the rest of the information was more obvious from context.
Taking account of other's emotions and being affected by emotions and biases yourself are two different things.
That's exactly why I never believed Spock-like characters in fiction. Human psychology isn't that complicated. If you're logical and smart, how on Earth wouldn't you be capable of understanding human emotions?
It's Mr Spock's problem. He always produced inferior decisions because he failed to take into account the emotions of others.