Artificial Intelligence doesn’t mean whatsoever robots with feelings, but the question is: can it be used to create one?
Firstly, Artificial Intelligence and robotics are tho differnet things, altough some people may not understand the difference due to the portrayal of AI in pop culture, sometimes the first and only time that a person has ever heard about the theme.
AI is instead a branch of computer science. It involves developing computer programs to complete tasks which would otherwise require human intelligence. AI algorithms can tackle learning, perception, problem-solving, language-understanding and/or logical reasoning.
Robotics is a branch of technology which deals with robots. Robots are programmable machines which are usually able to carry out a series of actions autonomously, or semi-autonomously. The way it is built it can use little to none AI programs.
But are there artificial intelligent robots?
Yes, since AI is a program and a robot is programmed, you can build a robot with some sort of ai software implemented.
So, a robot can “think”, but can it feel?
This is a complex question, since it is hard to define what is necessary to produce a real emotion, or what is to feel or not feel,and no one really knows altough there are Pscychology theories that try to define it.
Yet, AI can be used to comprehend or to study the emotions of a human, this is called emotional intelligence. By studying the language or our facial expressions, AI can detect what emotions we are feeling, can predict the best way to answer to a certain situation, can undesratnda the tone of certain conversation ,if it is happy or sad(for example,facebook messenger suggests certain images by analyzing the words present in the conversation ) and nowadays due to certain face tracking software in phones is possible by analyzing certain details in our face can to distinguish between faked and real emotions .
This advancements have already been incorporated to robotics, there are a few emotional intelligent robots, for example, Pepper a robot by SoftBank Robotics.
Pepper was first sold in 2015, and had its first 1,000 units sold out in under a minute. Pepper is described as a friendly partner who understands what the person is feeling.Basically what he does is studying the person(way of talk,gestures,etc) and its facial expressions and learns the proper way to respond to certain situations,for example,what to say when the person is sad or what facial expression to do when someone tells him good news.
He expresses feelings of its own, he can make a sad face or even smile, but is he actually feeling? No, he only does that expressions not because he feels happiness himself but because he learned that that was the right thing to do in that given moment.
Human vs. AI
Well humans although emotional creatures are not very good in terms of knowing what to say or what to do in certain situations or even sometimes to understand what a person is feeling or thinking, it is not uncommon to fight over something one said that wasn’t exactly what it meant, or what one said about certain topic or even what it didn’t say. AI has the capacity to learn exactly how a person likes to be treated , it can learn if a person prefers to talk to them calmly or prefers “tough love”, if it is a person who likes attention when sad or prefers to be left alone. In this way AI can surpass humans in the future, when it comes to comfort people due to their analysis capacity.
In concluding AI and Robotics are two different fiels that have an intersection(artificial intelligent robots), and artificial intelligent robots have a great potential in terms of emotional intelligence , but one of the questions remains: Can robots actually feel? And the truth there is not still an answer to that question,they sure can imitate,but the line between faking and actually feeling is not still very defined.
References:
https://www.softbankrobotics.com/emea/en/robots/pepper
https://blog.robotiq.com/whats-the-difference-between-robotics-and-artificial-intelligence
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609074/how-we-feel-about-robots-that-feel/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hot-thought/201712/will-robots-ever-have-emotions
https://machinelearnings.co/the-rise-of-emotionally-intelligent-ai-fb9a814a630e
https://www.thecut.com/2015/06/worlds-first-robot-with-feelings-is-a-big-hit.html
NT-AI 