CONCEPT
The Evaluative Gap
The structural distance between a system that processes information about stakes and a system that has stakes — a gap no amount of computational sophistication has closed.
The evaluative gap is this book's name for the structural distance between two capabilities that are easily confused: processing information about consequences, and feeling the weight of consequences. AI systems are capable of the first to an extraordinary degree; they are architecturally incapable of the second. Damasio's clinical work shows that humans with ventromedial prefrontal damage retain the first capacity while losing the second — and that the loss is catastrophic for practical judgment. The evaluative gap is where wisdom lives, and the question of the AI age is whether human judges will maintain the somatic conditions under which they can close the gap on the machines' behalf.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The gap is not a deficit in AI capability that future engineering will close. It is a structural feature of the distinction between processing and feeling. A system that processes without having stakes is not an imperfect version of a system that feels; it is a different kind of system