Artificial intelligence is developing at a rapid pace and so-called ‘emotional robots’, such as Pepper in Japan, are now on the market and designed to live with humans. Pepper is said to feel ‘joy, surprise, anger, doubt and sadness’.
But are robot feelings real enough for humans to build meaningful relationships with them? Currently, these AI emotions are only superficial, and many scientists doubt that consciousness, which enables humans to experience emotions, will ever be replicated by a machine. In the meantime, robots like Pepper are programmed to mimic what humans would do in a certain situation and can gauge human emotion by detecting changes in facial expression and tone of voice.
