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Comment by jimworm | Hacker News Reader

The "ground contact" parameter while walking sounds functionally very close to the "proprioception + pain" parameters for animals in a hobbling situation. An animal (me, specifically) quickly discovers a hobbling strategy by experimentation and a continuous sense of pain levels.

I think that pain will become a major part of the design in learning robots of the future.

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I think that pain will become a major part of the design in learning robots of the future.

This is something that Hollywood has been warning us about. We do not want to program robots to "feel" pain. We should build in avoidance algorithms, but not pain.

The problem is that anything that is "aversive" in the sense of avoidance may ultimately be perceived as pain. Whether we need to associate a emotional valence with pain in the way evolution has (because evolution coopted existing systems) is an open question. We may not need to, but any function that takes multiple pain like inputs and associates with with a conserved set of behavioral responses is likely to result in something similar to our perceived experience of pain.

Hollywood? :-(

I believe fiction plays an important role in shaping the philosophy of science. Forward-looking science fiction, especially, considers issues that have yet to be encountered by society, providing the opportunity to decide how to handle or avoid those issues in advance.

In the case of robots, I was imagining a line from the less-than-serious The Simpsons, when a robot flees a flaming building, asking, "Why was I programmed to feel pain?" ( http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ-ggzfdsMs ). Indeed, why would a robot be designed to suffer when enough suffering exists already? We should design our non-sentient robots now with that thought in mind, in anticipation of the possibility of creating self-aware AI.

Feeling "pain" is not the problem. The displeasure experienced due to the pain is.

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