Comet Enthusiast

There is ongoing debate about what constitutes life.
Synthetic bacteria for example, are created by man and yet also alive.
Some go so far as to say that robot “emotions” may already have
occurred—that current robots have not only displayed emotions, but in
some ways have experienced them.

“We’re all machines,” says Rodney Brooks author of “Flesh and
Machines,” and former director of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,  “Robots are made of different
sorts of components than we are — we are made of biomaterials; they are
silicon and steel — but in principle, even human emotions are
mechanistic.” A robot’s level of a feeling like sadness could be set as
a number in computer code, he said. But isn’t a human’s level of
sadness basically a number, too, just a number of the amounts of
various neurochemicals circulating in the brain? Why should a robot’s
numbers be any less authentic than a human’s?