Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

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Could a Robot Have Emotions?
Theoretical Perspectives from
Social Cognitive Neuroscience
ralph adolphs
Could a robot have emotions? I begin by dissecting the initial question,
and propose that we should attribute emotions and feelings to a
system only if it satisfies criteria in addition to mere behavioral duplication.
Those criteria require in turn a theory of what emotions and
feelings are. Some aspects of emotion depend only on how humans react
to observing behavior, some depend additionally on a scientific account
of adaptive behavior, and some depend also on how that behavior is
internally generated. Roughly, these three aspects correspond to the
social communicative, the adaptive/regulatory, and the experiential
aspects of emotion. I summarize these aspects in subsequent sections.
I conclude with the speculation that robots could certainly interact
socially with humans within a restricted domain (they already do),
but that correctly attributing emotions and feelings to them would require
that robots are situated in the world and constituted internally
in respects that are relevantly similar to humans. In particular, if
robotics is to be a science that can actually tell us something new about
what emotions are, we need to engineer an internal processing architecture
that goes beyond merely fooling humans into judging that the
robot has emotions.