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+--- Thread: Linking sense of touch to facial movement inches robots toward ‘feeling’ pain (/thread-8157.html)
Linking sense of touch to facial movement inches robots toward ‘feeling’ pain - C C - Feb 19, 2020
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/robots-feel-pain-artificial-intelligence
EXCERPT: . . . Sensors embedded in soft, artificial skin that can detect both a gentle touch and a painful thump have been hooked up to a robot that can then signal emotions, Minoru Asada reported [...] This artificial “pain nervous system,” as Asada calls it, may be a small building block for a machine that could ultimately experience pain (in a robotic sort of way). Such a feeling might also allow a robot to “empathize” with a human companion’s suffering.
[...] But there is an important distinction between a robot that responds in a predictable way to a painful thump and a robot that’s capable of approximating an internal feeling, says Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist ... In a recent article, he and Kingson Man argue that such an artificial sense of feeling might arise if robots were programmed to experience something akin to a mental state such as pain.
A robot with tactile sensors that can detect touch and pain is “along the lines of having a robot, for example, that smiles when you talk to it,” Damasio says. “It’s a device for communication of the machine to a human.” While that’s an interesting development, “it’s not the same thing” as a robot designed to compute some sort of internal experience, he says... (MORE - details)
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RE: Linking sense of touch to facial movement inches robots toward ‘feeling’ pain - Syne - Feb 19, 2020
Simulating pain is not experiencing pain.