Friday, October 2, 2015
Is It Possible for Robots to Feel Emotions?
Do robots have the ability to feel emotions? How can we know for sure whether or not a robot can feel? Due to the problem of the other mind, it is not possible for an individual to understand with a sense of certainty what is going on in the minds of other beings, or robots. Why do some people think that robots cannot feel emotions? If emotions were simply encoded into a robot, then technically, they would HAVE emotions; but would they FEEL them? I do not believe that robots have the ability to actually feel anything. They can have sensors that communicate with each other to transmit information, but they do not have the capability to physically feel. I think that robots could act as if they have emotions and respond in a certain why as a result of their coding, but they cannot truly feel their emotions. We are different from that of a robot because we have the freedom to feel a variance of emotions. None of our emotional responses are set in stone; one person may respond a different way from another to the same situation. Robots may have codes, but as humans, we can go beyond the code. The rigidity of the robotic code does not allow any room for emotional or spiritual growth; the materials that are used to assemble the robot do not allow for any physical growth. The lack of progress puts a crater in between robotics and the human race. They cannot experience things as we do if they do not grow physically and mentally with us. What about the Turing Test and communication skills? Although the Turing Test is referred to as the Imitation Game, I want to focus on the aspect of communication. Can robots have an actual conversation? We set up the Turing Test to operate with our humanistic rules of communication, but we can say that robots will communicate with each other in a completely different way; they may communicate in a way that we do not understand due to the intelligence difference. We project human behaviors onto non-human beings even though they communicate in a totally different way than we do. We infer that when a dog responds to its name, it has communicated with us when in reality, its response was only a learned behavior. So, are we requiring robots to reach an unreachable human aspect of communication even when they are not human? I believe that we have no clue what to expect with the advancement of AI technology. We know how we feel, but not how machines feel, or if they even can.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Personally, I agree that robots, as we are describing and defining them in this context, do not have the ability to feel emotions even though they may "have" emotions, or what is programmed to imitate emotions.
ReplyDeleteFrom my understanding, all emotions are just chemical reactions happening in our brains that have physiological, social, and mental effects on us. Robots that have no organic tissues can't feel these chemical reactions (at least not yet), so anything they do that constitutes an emotional response wouldn't actually be an emotional response. It would be like a sociopath trying to manipulate humans into believing what the robots are showing they "feel" is real. It just isn't real. There is no actual emotional response taking place because of the lack of organic tissue renders the robot incapable of having the chemical reactions that create emotions.