Why Robots Can Never Be Happy

Emotions are a funny thing. We all experience them. We seem to know when somebody else is experiencing them. We understand that certain situations can trigger certain emotional responses in ourselves and others. Our intrinsic understanding of such a fascinating phenomenon is astounding. We just get it. But why? And why do these emotions exist in the first place?

So, our emotions are required — as intelligent creatures — to affect our behaviours in certain situations. They make us responsive and adaptable. That makes us pretty smart. It gives us a great mechanism to respond differently to situations based, partially, on these things called feelings.

My research is in this area, so I may be a little biased when I say that giving robots “emotions” will make them smarter. Of course, it’s slightly more complex than that, but allowing robots to experience emotions, so that they can respond and adapt to changing situations (as is Darwin’s proposal), gives an element of intelligence that succeeds typical rule-based systems. Humans have adapted, and so we want our robots to adapt in the same way, both cognitively and emotionally. If we want robots to think like humans, we need them to experience our feelings too, right?

Not so fast.

Let’s pause for a second to think about the term, “emotion”. What we have typically called emotions are not always so. In the wider sense, emotion has been used as a catch-all word for these strong, intuitive feelings in any given situation. These emotions might last anywhere from a brief moment, to…

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