Feelings have hardly ever characterized the bearers of artificial intelligence. At least in their modern manifestation. Be that as it may, robots of the new generation, which may be presented to the general public in the near future, will be able to “feel” pain or even sympathize with the pain of their comrades. Having these human qualities sharply blurs the line between a machine and a living organism, providing science fiction writers with a lot of useful material to think about. However, will teaching robots such a “skill” be humane? Let's try to reason together in this article.
Can a robot be taught to feel?
Advances in the development of ever more advanced robotic sensory perception are bringing us closer and closer to the day when we can see with our own eyes a “human” robot capable of empathy and empathy. In order for the pile of iron to one day learn to experience emotions, scientists are already working on creating soft artificial leather that can carry out both a gentle touch and a painful blow. The sensors built into such material will allow an artificial body to process incoming tactile information by analogy with the nervous system of the body, allowing a human plastic satellite to learn to "empathize" with the suffering of others, says sciencenews.org.
It is now known that robotics specialists at Osaka University in Japan have developed touch sensors that reliably pick up various types of touch. In a robotic system called Affetto, which is a frighteningly realistic head of a child, these signals of touch and pain can be converted into emotional expressions. Due to the fact that the material developed by Japanese scientists is incredibly sensitive, the artificial skin allows the robot to better interact with the world around it.
The Affetto system, in its modernized form, may become the first robot capable of responding to touch and pain.
The researchers argue that Affetto could be the first step in the creation of truly humanoid robots. Mechanisms that can understand and listen can be helpful in caring for the sick and the elderly.
However, how exactly are the concepts of pain and empathy related? Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, believes that despite important differences in the perception of physical painful shock and mental shock, an artificial feeling of sympathy can also arise when the robot is programmed to know that pain exists. Be that as it may, if a person one day really succeeds in depriving a humanoid machine of its only advantage, the result of such an experience is unlikely to be humane. A machine capable of mastering emotions can eventually become not just a resigned executor of human orders, but also a suffering victim of a vicious, albeit unique in some way, experiment of its creator. So, if you and I one day begin to treat such a creature, albeit inanimate, with aggression,it is unlikely that humanity will be able to preserve its moral character for a long time, particles of which still stop us from world anarchy.
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Daria Eletskaya