A will to survive might take AI to the next level

Researchers argue that the biological principle of homeostasis would make for smarter robots

Robots with feelings might develop more advanced thinking abilities, too, neuroscientists propose.

Fiction is full of robots with feelings.

Like that emotional kid David, played by Haley Joel Osment, in the movie A.I. Or WALL•E, who obviously had feelings for EVE-uh. Robby the Robot sounded pretty emotional whenever warning Will Robinson of danger. Not to mention all those emotional train-wreck, wackadoodle robots on Westworld.

But in real life robots have no more feelings than a rock submerged in novocaine.

There might be a way, though, to give robots feelings, say neuroscientists Kingson Man and Antonio Damasio. Simply build the robot with the ability to sense peril to its own existence. It would then have to develop feelings to guide the behaviors needed to ensure its own survival.

“Today’s robots lack feelings,” Man and Damasio write in a new paper (subscription required) in Nature Machine Intelligence. “They are not designed to represent the internal state of their operations in a way that would permit them to experience that state in a mental space.”

So Man and Damasio propose a strategy for imbuing machines (such as robots or humanlike androids) with the “artificial equivalent of feeling.” At its core, this proposal calls for machines designed to observe the biological principle of homeostasis. That’s the idea that life must regulate itself to remain within a narrow range of suitable conditions — like keeping temperature and chemical balances within the limits of viability. An intelligent machine’s awareness of analogous features of its internal state would amount to the robotic version of feelings.

Such feelings would not only motivate self-preserving behavior, Man and Damasio believe, but also inspire artificial intelligence to more closely emulate the real thing.

Typical “intelligent” machines are designed to perform a specific task, like diagnosing diseases, driving a car, playing Go or winning at Jeopardy! But intelligence in one arena isn’t the same as the more general humanlike intelligence that can be deployed to cope with all sorts of situations, even those never before encountered. Researchers have long sought the secret recipe for making robots smart in a more general way.

In Man and Damasio’s view, feelings are the missing ingredient.

Feelings arise from the need to survive. When humans maintain a robot in a viable state (wires all connected, right amount of electric current, comfy temperature), the robot has no need to worry about its own self-preservation. So it has no need for feelings — signals that something is in need of repair.

Feelings motivate living things to seek optimum states for survival, helping to ensure that behaviors maintain the necessary homeostatic balance. An intelligent machine with a sense of its own vulnerability should similarly act in a way that would minimize threats to its existence.

To perceive such threats, though, a robot must be designed to understand its own internal state.

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