Artificial intelligence is already making great strides forward, but taking it to the next level might require a more drastic approach. According to two researchers, we could try giving AI a sense of peril and the fragility of its own existence. For now, the machines we code don't have a sense of their own being, or the need to fight for life and for survival, as we humans do. If those feelings were developed, that might give robots a better sense of urgency. The idea is to instil a sense of homeostasis – that need to balance conditions, whether that's the temperature of an environment, or the need for food and drink, that are required to ensure survival.

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.

JL Tom Siegfried reports in Science News: In real life robots have no more feelings than a rock submerged in novocaine. There might be a way, though, to give robots feelings: build the robot with the ability to sense peril to its own existence. It would then have to develop feelings to guide the behaviors needed to ensure its own survival. This calls for machines designed to observe the biological principle that life must regulate itself to remain within a narrow range of suitable conditions -- like keeping temperature and chemical balances within the limits of viability. An intelligent machine's awareness of analogous features of its state would amount to the robotic version of feelings.

Fiction is full of robots with feelings. Like that emotional kid David, played by Haley Joel Osment, in the movie A.I. Or WALL•E, who obviously had feelings for EVE-uh. Robby the Robot sounded pretty emotional whenever warning Will Robinson of danger. Not to mention all those emotional train-wreck, wackadoodle robots on Westworld. But in real life robots have no more feelings than a rock submerged in novocaine.