Hi, I'm a seventh grader from Miss Roy's honors class at Ridge Park Charter Academy. My question for MIT is, can you possibly make a robot with feelings? 

Hello, #askMIT. That was a really good question. 

Hi, I'm Dr. Goren Gordon. I'm a researcher at the Personal Robots Group in the Media Lab at MIT. We in the Personal Robots Group, and in other social robotics groups around the world, are trying to make robots that physically express emotions in how they move, how the speak, their facial expressions. We can make robots move as if they're happy or sad. But do they really have feelings? 

In order to really answer this question, we need to think of the following steps. First, we need to define what is emotion to understand what are emotions. This is a very hard question science has not fully understood until now. What is it to be happy? What does it mean to be sad? What does it mean to love? 

Only after we define these emotions verbally we can move to the next step. And the next step is to formalize this definition in a mathematical manner, to try to make a mathematical model of these feelings. This is also a very non-easy task-- to formalize psychological in effective states and processes, not easy. 

But let's say we answer this question also. The next thing is to program these mathematical models into the robot. And once we program the robot with these mathematical definitions of emotions, then by definition, the robot has emotions. 

I want to give you an example from my own research and curiosity. So I asked the question, can robots be curious? So the first thing, I defined curiosity verbally. So curiosity is the drive to learn as much as possible and the behavior that fulfills that drive. So that's a verbal definition. And then I made a mathematical model about this definition. It ended up with some equation that actually just means the robot moves in order to learn. And then I programmed that model into a robot. And the robot moved by itself, discovered its own hand, learned how to reach all by itself. So by these definitions, the robot is curious. 

I am becoming a celebrity, aren't I? 

So can we make a robot with feelings? Another thing to consider is that feelings are not necessarily only human feelings. Also animals have feelings. A dog can be happy or sad. And is it the same thing as human feelings? I don't know. Maybe robots can have their own feelings, their own types of feelings. Maybe we can program them to have feelings that are not necessarily human or even animal. The question here boils down to whether we can program robots to behave in an emotional way and how do we perceive them. 

So to summarize everything I've said until now, in order to actually answer the question, can we make robots with feeling, we must first understand own feeling, other beings' feeling, and how do we perceive these feelings. After we understand this and define it in a scientific way, we can program it into robots. 

So do you think I can have feelings? Bye-bye.