Your robot doggie could really be pleased to see you

There have been several stories in the last few weeks about emotional robots; robots that feel. Some are suggesting that this is the next big thing in robotics. It's something I wrote about in this blog post seven years ago: could a robot have feelings?

My position on this question has always been pretty straightforward. It's easy to make robots that behave as if they have feelings, but quite a different matter to make robots that really have feelings. 

But now I'm not so sure. There are I think two major problems with this apparently clear distinction between as if and really have.

The first is what do we mean by really have feelings. I'm reminded that I once said to a radio interviewer who asked me if a robot have feelings: if you can tell me what feelings are, I'll tell you whether a robot can have them or not. Our instinct (feeling even) is that feelings are something to do with hormones, the messy and complicated chemistry that too often seems to get in the way of our lives. Thinking, on the other hand, we feel to be quite different; the cool clean process of neurons firing, brains working smoothly. Like computers. Of course this instinct, this dualism, is quite wrong. We now know, for instance, that damage to the emotional centre of the brain can lead to an inability to make decisions. This false dualism has led I think to the trope of the cold, calculating unfeeling robot.

I think there is also some unhelpful biological essentialism at work here. We prefer it to be true that only biological things can have feelings. But which biological things? Single celled organisms? No, they don't have feelings. Why not? Because they are too simple. Ah, so only complex biological things have feelings. Ok, what about sharks or crocodiles; they're complex biological things; do they have feelings? Well, basic feelings like hunger, but not sophisticated feelings, like love or regret. Ah, mammals then. But which ones? Well elephants seem to mourn their dead. And dogs of course. They have a rich spectrum of emotions. Ok, but how do we know? Well because of the way they behave; your dog behaves as if he's pleased to see you because he really is pleased to see you. And of course they have the same body chemistry as us, and since our feelings are real* so must theirs be.

And this brings me to the second problem. The question of as if. I've written before that when we (roboticists) talk about a robot being intelligent, what we mean is a robot that behaves as if it is intelligent. In other words an intelligent robot is not really intelligent, it is an imitation of intelligence. But for a moment let's not think about artificial intelligence, but artificial flight. Aircraft are, in some sense, an imitation of bird flight. And some recent flapping wing flying robots are clearly a better imitation - a higher fidelity simulation - than fixed-wing aircraft. But it would be absurd to argue that an aircraft, or a flapping wing robot, is not really flying. So how do we escape this logical fix? It's simple. We just have to accept that an artefact, in this case an aircraft or flying robot, is both an emulation of bird flight and really flying. In other words an artificial thing can be both behaving as if it has some property of natural systems and really demonstrating that property. A robot can be behaving as if it is intelligent and - at the same time - really be intelligent. Are there categories of properties for which this would not be true? Like feelings..? I used to think so, but I've changed my mind.

I'm now convinced that we could, eventually, build a robot that has feelings. But not by simply programming behaviours so that the robot behaves as if it has feelings. Or by having to invent some exotic chemistry that emulates bio-chemical hormonal systems. I think the key is robots with self-models. Robots that have simulations of themselves inside themselves. If a robot is capable of internally modelling the consequences of it's, or other's actions, on itself, then it seems to me it could demonstrate something akin to regret (about being switched off, for instance). A robot with a self-model has the computational machinery to also model the consequences of actions on conspecifics - other robots. It would have an artificial Theory of Mind and that, I think, is a prerequisite for empathy. Importantly we would also program the robot to model heterospecifics, in particular humans, because we absolutely require empathic robots to be empathic towards humans (and, I would argue, animals in general).

So, how would this robot have feelings? It would, I believe, have feelings by virtue of being able to model the consequences of actions, both its own and others' actions, on itself and others. This would lead to it making decisions about how to act, and behave, which would demonstrate feelings, like regret, guilt, pleasure or even love, with an authenticity which would make it impossible to argue that it doesn't really have feelings.

So your robot doggie could really be pleased to see you.

*except when they're not.

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Postscript. A colleague has tweeted that I am confusing feelings and emotion here. Mea culpa. I'm using the word feelings here in a pop-psychology everyday sense of feeling hungry, or tired, or a sense of regret. Wikipedia defines feelings, in psychology, as a word is 'usually reserved for the conscious subjective experience of emotion'. The same colleague asserts that what I've outlined could lead to artificial empathy, but not artificial emotion (or presumably feelings). I'm not sure I understand what emotions are well enough to argue. But I guess the idea I'm really trying to explore here is artificial subjectivity. Surely a robot with artificial subjectivity who's behaviour expresses and reflects that subjective experience could be said to be behaving emotionally?

Related blog posts:
Robot know thyself
Could a robot have feelings?

Could a robot have feelings?

One of the great pleasures of giving public lectures is the questions that come from the audience, and my talk last week to the Bath U3A group was no different. A great question (and one I've been challenged with before) was "could a robot have feelings - emotions like fear, sadness or love?"

My questioner (and I guess most people) would be hoping for a comforting answer: No, only people and maybe some animals (your dog) can have feelings. In one sense that answer would be correct, because if we define feelings simply and subjectively as 'the feelings we experience when we are afraid, sad, or in love', such a definition would make those emotions uniquely human and something robots could not have by definition.

For the sake of argument let's get over that by asking a slightly different question: could a robot have artificial emotions that - in some way - are an analogue of human feelings. At this point I would normally say to my questioner, well, yes, I can conceive of a robot that behaves as if it is experiencing emotions. A humanoid robot, in other words, that acts is if it were afraid, or sad. The better the technology, then the more convincing and subtle would the (artificial) body language be. Actually we don't have to try very hard to imagine such a robot - colleagues in the lab are working on robot (heads) with artificial empathy. Here a picture.

At this point my questioner says "ah, but that robot doesn't really have feelings. It's just pretending to have feelings".

True! But don't human beings do that all the time. Isn't it the case, in fact, that we value the ability to be able to pretend to express feelings very highly, providing it's the honest deception of the actor's trade? We also value people who can make us feel in different ways: musicians, artists, poets or storytellers. Ok, I admit I'm being a little tricky here, but the point I'm trying to make is that humans can be very good at pretending to have feelings or at deceiving others into having feelings, and some (me included) have a hard time telling the difference.

Back to robots though. Yes, a robot that is programmed to behave as if it has feelings cannot, I grant, be said to actually have feelings. At best that robot is a good actor. This might seem to be the end of the issue but it's not, because the possibility of a robot that is very good at behaving as if it has feelings raises some pretty interesting issues. Why? Because in human robot interaction such a robot could have quite some power over the human. What interests me here is how such a robot would make humans feel towards it. Could a human, for instance, fall in love with an deeply (albeit artificially) empathic robot? I suspect the answer is yes.

This is a subject I'll return to in future blogs: not only the social implications of robots with artificial feelings, but also the question of whether robots could be designed that really do have feelings.