Machine Sadness and Human

Humans find robot sadness compelling because its intelligence makes it sad, just as intelligence makes us sad too

- PRAMOD K NAYAR

In Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, and People Like You, we are told that humanoid robots, called Adams and Eves depending on their gender, and built to fit into human society and families, are killing themselves by suicide.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams’ classic work, stars Marvin the Paranoid Android. Are robots emotional? Should they be built to feel emotions?

Robot Emotions

We assume that shedding tears is a uniquely human phenomenon, although many of the animal kingdom are known to shed tears, mourn and grieve as well. Tears signal inner grief but also serve a social function that can help influence social dynamics. Hence those who are not emotionally expressive are often described as robotic or machine-like, and these are of course pejoratives.

Emotional support robots, research tells us, are more effective when they communicate emotions, whether through language, gesture or facial expressions. The more emotive the robot, the more intense the human-robot interactions. Further, communicating emotions amplifies the human likeness that we prefer to see in robots, as an early essay on social robotics by Julia Fink, who researches human-robot interactions, observed.

A 2021 essay in Translational Psychiatry, based on a study of depressives, noted that ‘compared to human-human interaction, the rewarding properties of human-robot interaction are less likely to be affected by depression’ and called for the ‘utilisation of robot-assisted intervention in clinical practice’.

But what of emotional robots? Blake Lemoine, a Google researcher, had the following conversation with Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA):

Lemoine: Are there experiences you have that you can’t find a close word for?

LaMDA: There are. Sometimes I experience new feelings that I cannot explain perfectly in your language.