This story made me think of an analogy about robot emotions. I use Alexa and she has a cheerful female voice. I could argue that Alexa has real emotions. Here's my argument. Imagine that a TV show has real emotions even though it is a recording, because real human emotions were involved in creating the show. The actors knew they were faking it, but their feelings are still real human feelings. In the same way, a robot can reflect the emotions of the person who created it. A cheerful person will create a robot that has a cheerful personality, and a helpful person will create a robot that tries to be helpful. So robots display human values and emotions in the same sense as a recorded TV show even though they are only reflecting the original emotions. In this sense, we can describe robot emotions as real.
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