Semiosis: On Meaning in the Human and Machine

In order for AI systems to learn in a more "human" way, I wonder if semiosis and metaphor will help?

It seems clear to me that the way we humans generate meaning and metaphor are related to our senses and our physicality, and our experience of pain and pleasure, but it's difficult to know how precisely a machine's experience would need to approximate ours in order for it's sense of meaning and metaphor to be intelligible to us.