Building a Robot That Has Conscious Feelings and Thoughts Essay Example

Whether the future robots could ever have conscious thoughts and feelings is an issue that elicited heated debate among researchers and experts in the field of artificial intelligence. Some researchers contend that robots will never have conscious thoughts and feelings because emotions emanate from humans and thus cannot be replicated in any artificial being. However, proponents of intelligent robots claim that in the nearest future, humanoid and intelligent robots will walk along the streets interacting and working with humans. They further argue that robots will soon be able to sense, hear, smell, think and speak just like humans do. Such robots will also have personal emotions and self-awareness. Despite these conflicting views, it will be impossible to create a robot with conscious feelings and thoughts because machines lack hormones, biological body, physiological needs and cannot replicate emotions.

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Developing robots with conscious feelings and thoughts is difficult because intelligent machines lack a biological body. The primary feature that differentiates intelligent devices from animals and humans is that the former requires a biological body. Chella and Manzotti (2007) stated that intelligent robots with sensors could easily hear, smell, see, and feel the texture, shape and consistency of an object, as well as, pain, cold and heat but given that they do not drink, eat or digest makes it impossible for them to become conscious about feelings and thoughts. Similarly, a robot developed to interact with humans will not be capable of understanding and sharing the feelings or thoughts of gastronomical pleasure. Maciamo (2014) noted that the major hindrance to creating a robot with conscious feelings and thoughts emanates from the vagus nerve, which is tasked with regulating processes including, digestion, sweating, and heart beats. Due to lack of digestive systems, vagus nerve together with microbiome robots will ultimately the significant portion of people's psychological and emotional experiences. Principally, microbiome and nutrition affect the human brain by making behaviors and emotions to vary. However, given that robots lack these, it will be impossible to create intelligent machines with conscious thoughts and feelings.

Another significant difference between robots and humans is that people's thoughts and emotions can adversely be influenced by their physical conditions, health, and fatigue. McLain (2018) noted that irritability is a manifestation of physical or mental tiredness brought about by low nutrients or sleep. It can be argued that intelligent machines may overheat when used for an extended period and therefore may require rest. Nonetheless, that is purely fallacious in case the hardware is appropriately developed with a perfect cooling system and stable power supply. Similarly, intelligent machines such as robots cannot feel sick such as nausea, indigestion among others. The major point is that robots cannot experience these conditions because they lack immune and biological body system. Humans need to take a rest and recover their mental faculties and stabilize their emotions when they are tired. They also need to dream as this assists them to clean up their short term memory cache, consolidate memories, replete neurotransmitters and allowing neurons to fire freely (McLain, 2018). Unfortunately, robots cannot dream and will never require that since they lack biological brains that have neurotransmitters, synapses, and neurons that should be myelinated. Ultimately, without dreams, intelligent robots would, however, lose critical elements of feelings and thoughts.

Developing robots with conscious feelings and thoughts will be impossible because intelligent machines lack emotions and thoughts that are related to sexuality. Sexual relationship encompasses an emotion drawing two adults of different sex together to procreate and bring up children until they mature. Sexual love is brought about by hormones that encompass transformation in the biochemistry of people the whole body can result in various physiological impacts, as well as, lasting behavioral changes. Indeed, sexual love is neither an emotion nor a cognitive process. Therefore, trying to replicate love in conscious robots would simulate the insignificant aspects love. Besides, intelligent robots cannot experience the essence of sexual desire as they lack genes, hormones, as well as, other biochemical markers needed for sexual reproduction. As matters of fact, a robot gifted with artificial intelligence that is significantly higher or equal to that of humans but is unable to reproduce sexually would plan and arrange its existence in a completely different way than humans (Miguel, 2018). This is a good thing because most conflicts in life usually emanate as a result of sex. Nonetheless, it also implies that people will be unable to understand the behaviors and what motivates such robots. These in return would cause more troubles once the robots gain high levels of intelligence than humans. Therefore, by just lacking a single but critical emotion, intelligent robots may have priorities, behaviors, and morals that conflict those of humans thus causing more problems.

Just like animals, humans have an inherent need for maternal warmth during childhood. Reports indicate that humans denied maternal care and kindness usually experience psychological challenges while growing up (Signorelli, 2018). On the same note, humans need to feel safe. Therefore, it is just impossible to receive such kind of response and behavior from robots that do not change from childhood to adulthood, and hardly understand what it takes to have children, parents or to feel protected and lacks the biological drive to look for a shelter. Due to these factors, it will be impossible to develop a robot with conscious feelings and thoughts. Therefore, the inferences from these barriers are that it will be impossible to develop conscious robots that have similar feelings, thoughts, and behaviors as humans. Further, given that human feelings and emotions are deeply ingrained in their biological bodies and their socialization with their environment, the only means of developing robots would be to create a biological body for the artificial intelligence. This indeed is impossible shortly.

Conclusion

In conclusion, develop robots with conscious thoughts and feelings will be an uphill task due to barriers such as gastronomical enjoyment, drunkenness, dreams, as well as, associated creativity among others. It is difficult to bypass these hindrances because doing so would require creating a humanoid machine that has same intellectual faculties as humans, as well as, artificial body that has a digestive system. Such a robot would also be of different genders and be able to engage in sexual activities as humans do. Due to these impossibilities, designing a robot with conscious feelings and thoughts is just a dream that will be achieved.

References

Chella, A., & Manzotti, R. (2007). Artificial intelligence and consciousness. In Association for the advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fall Symposium (pp. 1-8). Palermo: University of Palermo Viale delle Scienze.

Maciamo, H. (2014). Could a machine feel human-like emotions? Retrieved April 6, 2019, from https://www.vitamodularis.org/articles/could_a_machine_feel_human-like_emotions.shtml

McLain, C. (2018). Can Artificial Intelligence Be Conscious? Retrieved April 6, 2019, from https://medium.com/hummingbird-ventures/can-artificial-intelligence-be-conscious-e316c2ac4769

Miguel Signorelli, C. (2018). Can Computers become Conscious and overcome Humans?. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 5, 45.

Signorelli, C. M. (2018). Can Computers overcome Humans? Consciousness interaction and its implications. In 2018 IEEE 17th International Conference on Cognitive Informatics & Cognitive Computing (ICCI* CC) (pp. 61-69). IEEE.