Apart from the most obvious response of not wanting to create beings that suffer needlessly, the concepts of qualia and personhood are tied together intractably, as I have elaborated in the court case section of my novel, Convex. In a nutshell, the argument posits that personhood is contingent on being able to experience negative and positive states such as suffering and happiness. Whether this is a valid argument or not is up for debate, but at the very least, granting personhood to a being without any subjective mental states does raise some interesting ethical and legal issues. Even if we could implement experiential emotions or emotion-analogues in our robots, should we?

Some will say it’s a no-brainer. Within the context of our culture, where displaying one’s feelings is considered healthy, and where being emotionless and cold is often associated with sociopaths and serial killers, it would seem that if we want our robots to be good, we would want them to experience emotions: we would want them to know what being good feels like; we would want them to experience a moral high when they do something right, and feel guilt and remorse when they err.

 But we must dig deeper. To properly answer the question, we must examine in greater detail the interplay between emotion and cognition.

It is commonly believed that emotions provide an evolutionary advantage: emotions are nature’s way of short-circuiting otherwise slow decision-making processes. Emotionally charged reasoning can be fast. When you see a bison rushing you, you don’t want to overanalyse the situation; you just need to let that surge of adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol that you experience as fear let you pilot a quick escape. On the other hand, positive emotions such as love and sympathy help bond with others and let us form stable social structures, which, in turn, boost survivability.

Robots too will need to make quick, inspired decisions every now and then. Does that mean we must incorporate emotions into their cognitive framework? I see two objections. The first is that there is no reason to believe that emotions are the only way to arrive at quick, off the fly decisions, especially in a brain that is not constrained by biology and evolutionary legacy. Nature builds on what it already has; with AI, we have the advantage of designing from the scratch. Modern decision-making systems, which can be a mix of algorithmic and neural-net-based computing methodologies, have a profusion of heuristic and search techniques to draw on; when in doubt, deep learning architectures can always evolve their own algorithms by trial and error. In an advanced robot brain, implementation of such cognitive shortcuts will probably be nothing like how emotions are “implemented” in our own brains. If these cognitive processes are accompanied by qualia, they will likely be alien as well.

The second objection is that emotions don’t always lead to the best outcomes. Emotional reasoning is a double-edged sword. Fear is fine when you are trying to avoid predators in the tall grass, but not very useful when you are trying to work your way up the corporate ladder. You can be angry and play chess; you can be calm and play chess. You can be in love before you propose marriage; you can propose marriage without feeling anything toward your partner. With chess, the presence of strong emotions will probably make you lose the game; with marriage, the absence of strong emotions will most likely see it fail.

What about moral decision making? Surely feelings like love and kindness are necessary in the moral sphere?

Opinion has been divided on this for at least two thousand years. We have travelled from the Greek/Enlightenment ideas of placing reason above emotions to where modern neuroscience tells us that emotions and moral decision making are deeply intertwined. The relationship between emotions and moral decision making is complex, but there is considerable support in scientific circles for some or the other form of a dual-process theory of the mind, where fast, intuitive emotional thinking is contrasted with the slower, more deliberative thinking that utilizes logic and reason as opposed to gut feelings. Furthermore, just as there is no single emotional centre in the human brain, there is no particular moral centre. While some brain regions are more active than others when making moral decisions, there is no homunculus or seat of conscience guiding our actions. Research tells us that humans make moral decisions using a balance of emotion and reason. When they converge, we end up making good, personally satisfying decisions. When they diverge, moral dilemmas emerge.