Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

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Beware the Passionate Robot
michael a. arbib
The warning, “Beware the Passionate Robot,” comes from the observation
that human emotions sometimes have unfortunate effects, raising
the concern that robot emotions might not always be optimal. However,
the bulk of the chapter is concerned with biology: analyzing brain mechanisms
for vision and language to ground an evolutionary account relating
motivational systems to emotions and the cortical systems which
elaborate them. Finally, I address the issue of whether and how to characterize
emotions in such a way that one might say that a robot has
emotions even if they are not empathically linked to human emotions.
A CAUTIONARY TALE
On Tuesday, I had an appointment with N at 3 P.M., but when I
phoned his secretary at 2:45 to check the place of the meeting, I
learned that she had forgotten to confirm the meeting with N. I was
not particularly upset, we rescheduled the meeting for 4 P.M. the
next day, and I proceeded to make contented use of the unexpected
free time to catch up on my correspondence.
On Wednesday, I decided in midafternoon to put together a
chart to discuss with N at our meeting; but the printer gave me some
problems, and it was already after 4 when I left my office for the
meeting, feeling somewhat flustered but glad that I had a useful