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SOCIABLE ROBOTS 121

ISSUES: WHAT MIGHT IT MEAN FOR ROBOTS TO “FEEL”?

While skeptics may admit readily to being impressed by the subtle
interactions that arose between Kismet and a human visitor, they
often raise the question: How can any machine possibly experience
emotions in the same way humans, or even the more developed
animals, do?
After all, people and other animals are the products of hundreds
of millions of years of evolution. Our minds float on a sea of chem-
istry; animals are fundamentally analog, not digital. Machines, on
the other hand, have behavior that is determined by explicit design,
however intricate. Any analog behavior must be simulated digitally.
The skeptics’ objections can be addressed with another question:
How does any person know that other people experience emotions
in the same way he or she does? Humans do not have a shared ner-
vous system or (as far as we know) the ability to experience directly
the thoughts of others. An individual can only know about another
person’s state of mind by what is picked up through language, verbal
or nonverbal.
There are at least two reasons why people normally grant other
people the status of thinking, feeling beings like themselves.
Intellectually, it stands to reason that if a being belongs to the same
biological species and behaves in similar ways, he or she must have
similar emotional states. The most compelling reason to accept that
other human beings have real feelings is that we were nurtured by
parents who responded to our feelings as though they understood
them, while we learned how our feelings were bound up with those
of caregivers, teachers, friends, and rivals.
As for robots, even when encountering the relatively simple
Kismet, people soon forgot they were dealing with a machine that
could be fully described by a series of state and circuit diagrams.
As Kismet’s descendants become so complex and subtle that no
one human can comprehend all of their dynamics, and as our
interactions with such robots become increasingly satisfying and
useful, we may acknowledge that the robot with whom we are
living feels—perhaps not exactly as we do, but has feelings that we
acknowledge because we want to.