Emotion, artificial intelligence, and ethics

Kevin LaGrandeur

pp. 97-109

in: Jan Romportl, Eva Zackova, Jozef Kelemen (eds), Beyond artificial intelligence, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

The growing body of work in the new field of "affective robotics' involves both theoretical and practical ways to instill – or at least imitate – human emotion in Artificial Intelligence (AI), and also to induce emotions toward AI in humans. The aim of this is to guarantee that as AI becomes smarter and more powerful, it will remain tractable and attractive to us. Inducing emotions is important to this effort to create safer and more attractive AI because it is hoped that instantiation of emotions will eventually lead to robots that have moral and ethical codes, making them safer; and also that humans and AI will be able to develop mutual emotional attachments, facilitating the use of robots as human companions and helpers. This paper discusses some of the more significant of these recent efforts and addresses some important ethical questions that arise relative to these endeavors.