Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

“edison” and “russell” 7
Inspired by what was learned with fear in rats, a roboticist would say
“OK! My walking robot has analogous problems: encountering a predator—for
a mobile robot, a car or truck in the street—and reacting to a
low battery state, which signals the robot to prepare itself for functioning
in a different mode, where energy needs to be saved.” Those two robot
behaviors are very similar to the rat behaviors in the operational sense
that they serve the same kind of purpose. I think we might just as well
call them “fear” and “pain.” I would argue that it does not matter what I
call them—the roboticist can still be inspired by their neural implementations
and design the robotic system accordingly.
“Hmm, the amygdala is common to both behaviors and receives
input from the hypothalamus (pain) and the LGN (perception). How
these inputs are combined in the amygdala is unknown to neuroscientists,
but maybe I should link the perceptual system of my robot and the
energy monitor system. I’ll make a subsystem that modulates perception
on the basis of the amount of energy available: the more energy, the
more objects perceptually analyzed; the less energy, only the most salient
(with respect to the goal at hand) objects are analyzed.”
The neuroscientist would reply: “That’s interesting! I wonder if the
amygdala computes something like salience. In particular, the hypothalamic
inputs to the amygdala might modulate the speed of processing
of the LGN inputs. Let’s design an experiment.” And the loop is
closed!
RUSSELL: I agree with you that that interaction is very much worthwhile,
but only if part of the effort is to understand what the extra circuitry
adds. In particular, I note that you are still at the level of “emotions
without feelings,” which I would rather call “motivation” or “drive.” At
this level, we can ask whether the roboticist learns to make avoidance
behavior more effective by studying animals. And it is interesting to ask
if the roboticist’s efforts will reveal the neural architecture as in some
sense essential to all successful avoidance systems or as a biologically
historical accident when one abstracts the core functionality away from
the neuroanatomy, an abstraction that would be an important contribution.
But does this increment take us closer to understanding human
emotions as we subjectively know them or not?
EDISON: I certainly agree with that, and I do think it does! One final point:
aren’t the issues we are addressing—can a robot have emotion, does a
robot need emotion, and so on—really the same issues as with animals and
emotions—can an animal have emotion, does an animal need emotion?
RUSSELL: It will be intriguing to see how far researchers will go in answering
all these questions and exploring the analogies between them.
Stimulated by this conversation, Edison and Russell returned to the
poster sessions, after first promising to meet again, at a robotics conference.