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Volume 1 Issue 10, October 2019

Designing machines with feeling analogues

Living organisms evaluate their own goals and behaviour in a dynamic world by homeostasis: the regulation of internal body states. Man and Damasio propose to design machines with something akin to this physiological process, so that they have an internal guidance for making decisions and controlling behaviours. The authors consider the possibility of constructing robots with bodies that, in a process that mimics homeostasis, need to be maintained within a narrow range of viability states. Examining advances in the area of soft robotics, the authors raise the possibility of building machines with sensors and effectors that provide them with multimodal homeostatic data - or feeling analogues.

See Man et al.

Image: Colin Anderson Productions pty ltd – Getty images. Cover Design: Karen Moore

Editorial

  • The organizers of Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, a relatively new AI-themed meeting held recently in Berlin, are dedicated to encouraging informal interactions and conversations to tackle the challenge of bridging scientific cultures.

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Reviews

  • Robots and machines are generally designed to perform specific tasks. Unlike humans, they lack the ability to generate feelings based on interactions with the world. The authors propose a new class of machines with evaluation processes akin to feelings, based on the principles of homeostasis and developments in soft robotics and multisensory integration.

    • Kingson Man
    • Antonio Damasio
    Perspective
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Research

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Challenge Accepted

  • Tired of training neural networks? Try optimizing virtual creatures instead.

    • Sam Kriegman
    Challenge Accepted
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