Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

234 robots
The majority view in this volume seems to be that we need explanatory
theories that include theoretical entities whose properties may not be directly
detectable, at least using the methods of the physical sciences or the measurements
familiar to psychologists (including button-pushing events, timings,
questionnaire results, etc.). This is consistent with the generic definition of
emotion proposed in this chapter, based on internal processes that are capable
of modulating other processes (i.e., initiating or interrupting them, changing
parameters that give rise to dispositional changes, etc.). Such a definition should
be useful both for psychologists interested in the study of human emotions
and for engineers implementing deep emotional control systems for robots or
virtual agents. While the definition was not intended to cover all aspects of
the ordinary use of the word emotion (nor could it cover them all given that
“emotion” is a cluster concept), it can be used as a guideline that determines
the minimal set of architectural features necessary to implement emotions (as
defined in this paper). Furthermore, it allows us to determine whether a given
architecture is capable of implementing such emotions and, if so, of what kinds
(as different emotion terms are defined using architectural features). This is
different from much research in AI, where it is merely taken as obvious that
a system of a certain sort is indeed emotional.
More importantly, our definition also suggests possible roles of mechanisms
that generate what are described as “emotions” in agent architectures
(e.g., as interrupt controllers, process modifiers, action initiators or suppressors,
etc.) and, hence, when and where it is appropriate and useful to employ
such control systems. This is crucial for a general understanding of the
utility of what is often referred to as “emotional control” and consequently
the adaptive advantage of the underlying mechanisms in biological systems,
even though many of the emotions they produce may be dysfunctional.
Do Robots Need Emotions and Why?
One of the questions some robot designers address is whether there is any
principled reason why their robots need emotions to perform a given task
(assuming some clear definition of emotion). However, there is a more general
question: whether there is any task that cannot be performed by a system
that is not capable of having emotional states.
The answer to this question is certainly nontrivial in the general case.
For simple control systems satisfying a particular definition of emotional, it
may be possible to define a finite-state machine that has exactly the same
input–output behavior but does not instantiate any emotion in the specified
sense. Most so-called emotional agents currently developed in AI would
probably fall under this category.