• Question: Can robots have emotions?.

    Asked by Imogen_beach to Katie, Iulia, Mateusz, Ollie, Siobhan on 7 Mar 2017. This question was also asked by annacupcake101, faith.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 7 Mar 2017:

      That’s a deep question! We still have debates about this. It’s not as much about whether they can or cannot (you can program almost anything into a robot), but what it would mean, if they could.

      We have a lot of laws protecting us from things that hurt. If we build a robot to have emotions, will it be right to turn it off or break it? Will we be obligated to fix it, much like we have hospitals to fix humans? Will we be willing to forgive a robot if it does something wrong? Will we have any right to change its programming?

      I think, at least for now, we build robots to help us with difficult, repetitive tasks, and we don’t want them to have any thoughts or emotions about it. After all, what use is there of a car, which refuses to drive you around, just because it feels moody that day?

    • Photo: Iulia Motoc

      Iulia Motoc answered on 7 Mar 2017:

      Robots cannot have emotions… yet. We cannot understand how humans have all these emotions, so we are not able to create something that we don’t understand.

      Right now, the robots do what we make them to do. If a robot has a “personality,” it has the personality of the engineer that programmed it. If a robot is intelligent and in learns things, it only learns things through the engineer’s eyes. The robot cannot make the difference between good or right on it own, so at the moment it learns how to engineer makes it to learn.

      So we can say that a robot mirrors the engineer. So if we do create a robot that has emotions, it will have the same emotions as the engineer that programmed it.

      On top of that, emotions are not linked with our brain. We associate emotions to certain memories, or activities, objects, people, but we do not understand how we do this association.

      We are very far from learning how this is happening.

    • Photo: Katie Pavey

      Katie Pavey answered on 7 Mar 2017:

      Ooh that’s a very good question Imogen.

      I think probably not, at least not in the same way that humans do. They are very good at following sets of instructions given to them by humans, but they struggle to make decisions on their own. As a result, it would be difficult for them to get angry or upset as they just aren’t set up to think like that.

      On the other hand if you don’t look after them they will breakdown more often (I always think it’s like they are getting tired). Also if you give them a bad set of instructions they will get stuck – so I think that’s a bit similar to when us humans get confused.

Comments