Machines with Emotions and Feelings

The Edge has published an
article by Marvin Minsky on the subject of
emotion and feeling that ties in with his book, The Emotion Machine. He
starts by summarizing a common belief people seem to hold: "Of course
machines can do useful things. We can make them add up huge columns of
numbers or assemble cars in factories. But nothing made of mechanical
stuff could ever have genuine feelings like love." From there, he
examines what we know about emotion and feelings in humans, from
infants, through adulthood. He also
looks at why it is that many people react strangely when
confronted with the idea that the human body is a complex machine,
frequently by inserting words
like "merely a machine" or "nothing more than a machine". Minsky
concludes that these people are carrying around an obsolete idea of
machines that by
definition implies inhumanity.



Source: http://www.netchain.com