The Next Goal in AI: Robots Who Fear Death - Nerdist

In his 1942 short story "Runaround," legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov clearly outlined his "Three Laws of Robotics," which could, at least in fictional worlds, fundamentally underpin autonomous robots' behavior. The last of the three laws states, in part, that, "A robot must protect its own existence…" This may turn out to be quite necessary for the development of real-life autonomous robots as well, especially when it comes to their ability to feel. At least that's the argument being made in a recently published white paper outlining the significance of self-preservation in robots. The paper, which comes via Futurism, was recently published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence by Antonio Damasio and Kingson Man of the University of Southern California's Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI); Damasio is one of the institute's directors, and Man is one of its research scientists. In the paper, available in full here for free, Damasio and Man argue that in order to develop "feeling machines," they must be programmed with the task of maintaining homeostasis.