Should Robots Be Built to Feel Pain?

My latest article on Impakter, just published, about AI and how we should organize our future with sentient machines. Should we build them to feel pain and other emotions? What is the point of it? What are the dangers?

 Neku – Robot Lover Song (Featuring Aline) in Youtube video

What is the role of pain in our lives?  Pain, we can all agree, is unpleasant, both physically and emotionally. Pain acts as an alarm when faced with danger. Pain can be excruciating, tragic, the forerunner of death. In short, when we feel pain, we feel more alive than ever. Now that robots play an increasing role in our society, should we design robots as sentient machines with the ability to feel pain?  

Robots are everywhere in manufacturing, in agriculture, in transport and distribution, in communications, in the home. And they appear not just as androids like the famous science fiction author Isaac Asimov visualized 75 years ago, but in a vast range of devices, from autonomous vacuum cleaners to whole factory production lines and military drones.

Arguably, it might make sense to endow some of them with the capacity to feel pain in situations where it could help the machine foresee a threat and save itself from possible damage. But should it be endowed with merely a series of physical reactions demonstrating pain or should it feel it as an emotion the way we humans feel it?

When a machine feels pain, will it cry?

Or an equally valid question: should it cry?

The question of whether robots should feel pain may sound futile, but it’s not. With advances in computing power, particularly with quantum computing just around the corner, we are close to being able to create robots with General Artificial Intelligence. Not just a specific ability like beating human champions at difficult games like chess and Go, but a “general” intelligence that could lead soon to the dreaded Singularity, the point where Artificial Intelligence will surpass human intelligence.

In short, we are headed towards a world where science fiction meets reality, where our planet hosts two types of “sentient machines”, us and the robots.

How to Organize a World full of Sentient Machines

Scientists have been working on this for several years, notably Beth Singler  and Ewan St John Smith, both at Cambridge University.
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Read the rest on Impakter, click here. 

Find out about our future with robots. Let me know what you think!