if machines could feel emotion, they'd be just like us

In a world where we get closer and closer to the contents of Detroit Become Human, the fate of androids and machinery gets more controversial by the day. We've heard it all, from toasters starting uprisings to Google stealing our information for nefarious purposes - for itself, I mean. We all know that's already happening outside of malicious search engines.

But if machines developed emotion, what would be the difference between us?

Other than the casing, nothing.

We, as humans, seem to hold emotions to a high standard of morality or civility, but we over-aggrandize what they actually are. They're chemical reactions that happen inside your brain. Let's piggyback off the more obvious comparison - our emotions are simply reactions that cause us to feel things to let us know that something is wrong or that something is right. As psychology expert Kendra Cherry explains, "emotions help us to take action, to survive, strike and avoid danger, to make decisions, to understand others." Put in basic terms, it's an unconscious survival response that our brains have created. It's not a symbol of humanity or exclusively human. It's a response that, down to its foundations, is extremely similar to a computer program. Like a machine.

But we should get down to the more debatable part of my point. Emotions happen inside our bodies, inside our brains. They are unfelt by the outside world. Naturally, we can understand what someone might be feeling based on their outward expression, but we can't truly know anyone else's emotions. This is why actors are so effective. They aren't actually in those carefully constructed situations, but their expressions make us feel like they are. What are emotions if not what they are to the person feeling them?

If we created machinery that could emulate emotions, they wouldn't know that what they're experiencing is an emulation of what humans feel. To them, those emotions would feel as real as anyone else's. When it comes down to it, all that truly matters is the one who feels them. It causes as much pain or happiness as the real thing, and the thing about emotions is that we can't live our lives separate from them once we know they're there. We act based on what we know. And this creates a whole other world of issues.

It would be highly immoral to apply emotions to anything we aren't prepared to treat as human, because if a machine felt the way we do, the only difference between us and them would be what our feelings are encased in. It's our emotions that create the bonds and paths of our lives - they dictate our choices, what we like, who we love. A machine would cease its intended purpose because it would have the ability to choose its own.

Well, this became a long tangent. My short answer is that no, there would be no internal difference between humans and machines if they developed emotions. And slightly straying from topic, but I'm only 25% of the way through Detroit Become Human and I've already gathered this conclusion - I mean, all of our opinions are inspired by something.

But, let's not go down this path. Humanity isn't even built to accommodate for variants of itself, let alone other species.

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