Scientists believe programming AI for self-preservation could be the key to giving robots feelings

A new paper from researchers at the University of Southern California's Brain and Creativity Institute considers a novel path toward creating robots with'feelings.' The key, according to researchers Kinson Man and Antonio Damasio, is homestasis, a self-preservation principle by which living creatures seek to maintain internal biological equilibrium by avoiding certain environments or kinds of stimuli. Were robots to be programmed with a homeostatic sense of self-preservation, would that put them on a path toward developing true feelings? According to a Science News report on the paper, Man and Damasio consider the most promising lead for feeling robots to come through the combination of soft robotics and deep learning, which when combined might approximate a homeostatic reaction to negative environmental stimuli. Man and Domasio point to a 1954 experiment by W. Ross Ashby that demonstrated how homeostatic sensing might be translated into robotics.