Perspective

https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0103-7

Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design

of feeling machines
Kingson Man and Antonio Damasio

Attempts to create machines that behave intelligently often conceptualize intelligence as the ability to achieve goals, leaving
unanswered a crucial question: whose goals? In a dynamic and unpredictable world, an intelligent agent should hold its own
meta-goal of self-preservation, like living organisms whose survival relies on homeostasis: the regulation of body states aimed
at maintaining conditions compatible with life. In organisms capable of mental states, feelings are a mental expression of the
state of life in the body and play a critical role in regulating behaviour. Our goal here is to inquire about conditions that would
potentially allow machines to care about what they do or think. Under certain conditions, machines capable of implementing a
process resembling homeostasis might also acquire a source of motivation and a new means to evaluate behaviour, akin to that
of feelings in living organisms. Drawing on recent developments in soft robotics and multisensory abstraction, we propose a
new class of machines inspired by the principles of homeostasis. The resulting machines would (1) exhibit equivalents to feel-
ing; (2) improve their functionality across a range of environments; and (3) constitute a platform for investigating conscious-
ness, intelligence and the feeling process itself.

W
e propose the design and construction of a new class of
machines organized according to the principles of life
regulation, or homeostasis. These machines have physical
constructions—bodies—that must be maintained within a narrow
range of viability states and thus share some essential traits with all
living systems. The fundamental innovation of these machines is
the introduction of risk-to-self. Rather than up-armouring or add-
ing raw processing power to achieve resilience, we begin the design
of these robots by, paradoxically, introducing vulnerability.
Living organisms capable of mentation are fragile vessels of pain,
pleasure and points in between. It is by virtue of that fragility that
they gain access to the realm of feeling. The main motivation for
this project is a set of theoretical contributions to the understand-
ing of biological systems endowed with feeling. Damasio1 has pro-
vided a rationale for the emergence of feelings from the physiology
of life regulation. Feelings are intrinsically about something: mak-
ing it possible for an organism to gravitate towards states of at least
good and preferably optimal life regulation, thus maintaining life
and extending it into the future. We must add that, in our conceptu-
alization, feelings are of necessity conscious, and play a critical role
in the machinery of consciousness.
For the homeostatic machines we envision, behaviours can carry
real consequences. The world affords risks and opportunities, not
in relation to an arbitrary reward or loss function, but in relation to
the continued existence of the machine itself and, more to the point,
to the quality of feeling that is the harbinger of the good or bad
outcome relative to survival. Rewards are not rewarding and losses
do not hurt unless they are rooted in life and death. True agency
arises when the machine can take a side in this dichotomy, when
it acts with a preference for (or, seen from a different angle, makes
a reliable prediction of2) existence over dissolution. A robot engi-
neered to participate in its own homeostasis would become its own
locus of concern. This elementary concern would infuse mean-
ing into its particular information processing3. A robot operating
on intrinsically meaningful representations might seek especially
intelligent solutions to the tasks set before it—that is, augment the
reach of its cognitive skills.
We bring a biological perspective to the effort to produce
machines with an artificial equivalent of feeling. For this effort, we
will rely on recent developments from two fields: materials science
and computer science. Turning first to new materials, we note that the
past decade has witnessed the birth of a sub-discipline, soft robotics.
This was enabled by new discoveries in the design and construction
of soft ‘tissues’ embedded with electronics, sensors and actuators.
These artificial tissues are flexible, stretchable, compressible and
bounce back resiliently—in short, they are naturally compliant with
their environments. Combined with conventional parameters such
as temperature and energy level, soft materials potentially provide a
rich source of information on body and environment.
The second development concerns statistical machine learn-
ing algorithms for the creation of abstract representations. New
computational techniques may allow us to bring maps of the inner
and outer worlds into register. There has been enormous attention
paid to the capabilities of deep learning, but here we focus on one
particular application of the technology: its ability to bridge across
sensory modalities, including not only exteroception but also the
modalities concerned with internal organism states—interoception
and proprioception. This advance provides a crucial piece of the
puzzle of how to intertwine a system’s internal homeostatic states
with its external perceptions and behaviour.
Self-interest as fount of creativity
Today’s robots lack feelings. They are not designed to represent the
internal state of their operations in a way that would permit them
to experience that state in a mental space. They also lack selfhood
and ‘aboutness’. All these shortcomings are related. It is true that
present-day intelligent machines perform extremely well in narrow
domains, but they fare poorly in unconstrained interactions with
the real world. Our approach diverges from traditional concep-
tions of intelligence that emphasize outward-directed perception

Brain and Creativity Institute, Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
e-mail: kman@usc.edu; damasio@usc.edu

446 Nature Machine Intelligence | VOL 1 | OCTOBER 2019 | 446–452 | www.nature.com/natmachintell

NATUre MAchIne InTellIgence
and abstract problem solving. We regard high-level cognition
as an outgrowth of resources that originated to solve the ancient
biological problem of homeostasis. Homeostasis manifests as self-
interest and inspires creative behaviour in complex environments,
natural and social. Current machines exhibit some intelligence but
no sense-making, defined as an agent’s “meaningful relation to the
environment”4. We propose that meaning begins to emerge when
information processing carries homeostatic consequences.
In Shannon’s5 original formalization of information, as reduc-
tion in uncertainty of the contents of a message, the problem of
the message’s meaning was neatly set aside. Recently, Kolchinsky
amd Wolpert3 have proposed a formal definition of semantic, or
meaningful, information as that subset of Shannon information
that is related to a system’s future viability states. They take a causal-
counterfactual approach to identify semantic information by calcu-
lating how the system’s future viability would have been affected,
had that information been different. As the authors note, the suc-
cess or failure of their definition hinges on the selected measure
of viability—which in their case is negative entropy, chosen for its
thermodynamic, if not necessarily biologic, interpretability.
Unlike other physical systems, living bodies are subject to peren-
nial risk and decay, resulting from their own regular operations of
life. But nothing equivalent holds for a disembodied algorithm or
current robots whose physical existence is a given and, for practical
purposes, guaranteed. In our view, sense data become meaningful
when the data can be connected to the maintenance and integrity of
the sensing agent—that is, to the organism’s package of regulatory
operations that contributes to homeostasis. Without a biological
framework, sensory processing that is not attached to a vulnerable
body ‘makes no sense’.
Moving beyond embodiment. Our approach to building a machine
with something akin to feeling takes place in a historical context
of autonomous embodied systems (reviewed in refs. 6,7). Norbert
Wiener’s cybernetics placed great emphasis on feedback-based con-
trol to produce and maintain states within a desired range. W. Ross
Ashby’s felicitously named homeostat demonstrated the emergence
of self-restoring stability. Ashby’s device coupled electrical and mag-
netic sensors and effectors in such a way that, when disturbed, it
executed a random parameter search until equilibrium was restored
(Fig. 1; see refs. 8,9). Behaviour-based robots, perhaps originating
with Grey Walter’s tortoises10,11 and brought to the fore by Rodney
Brooks’s subsumption architecture12, relied on the embodiment of
the agents—the fact that the AI had a physical body in continu-
ous interaction with the environment—as a crucial source of their
ability to behave intelligently. Lipson, Bongard and colleagues have
since extended this line of research into the evolution of robots
that model their own morphology in order to execute behavioural
goals13. Other work has produced agents that can regulate their own
susceptibility to environmental cues based on abstract internal vari-
ables14. The Cyber Rodent project15 has explored the evolution of
neural network controllers to support ‘mating’ and ‘foraging’ behav-
iour of robots that seek out conspecifics and battery packs in the
environment. In simulation experiments making explicit reference
to homeostasis, phototactic robots used ‘neural plasticity’ to restore
adaptive behaviour following visual field inversion16.
Some preliminary steps have been taken to develop ‘emotional
circuits’ to influence robotic goal selection17. Others have con-
structed robots capable of emotional expressions (typically through
facial movements) to facilitate human–robot interaction18, but
these motivation schedules and emotional performances have not
been rooted in the machine’s own welfare, let alone well-being.
Homeostatic-like features, if at all present, were implemented from
the outside in: agents were instructed to maximize, or keep within
a set range, certain arbitrary values. Unappreciated by the robot
itself was the fact that if these values veered to an extreme then its
Nature Machine Intelligence | VOL 1 | OCTOBER 2019 | 446–452 | www.nature.com/natmachintell
Perspective
own existence would be jeopardized. The ‘emotions’ and ‘values’
underlying behaviours were not relevant to the continuance of the
system itself. Ultimately, these systems lacked a viability constraint.
All robots of this class would be described by the philosopher Hans
Jonas as biologically indifferent19 and, correspondingly, affectless.
Despite behaving with seeming purpose, what these machines did—
and this is of the essence—did not matter to the systems themselves.
In brief, the presence of a body serving as an aid or scaffold to
problem-solving does not suffice to generate meaning. Nor does
calculating an abstract internal parameter and labelling it ‘emo-
tion’ elevate the parameter to this suggestive title. Di Paolo20 has
criticized the programme of embodied robotics as still missing an
organism-level logic: “emotions don’t come in boxes.” That is why
we advocate a transition from ‘embodied artificial intelligence’ to
‘homeostatically motivated artificial intelligence’. Intelligence has
been defined as21 “an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range
of environments.” But this definition prompts a follow-up question:
whose goals? Does an agent that myopically follows orders to the
extent that it endangers itself and compromises its ability to carry
out future orders deserve to be called intelligent?
Living systems, on the other hand, have the property of selfhood.
They continuously construct and maintain themselves against the
natural tendency toward dissolution and decay. “This world is at
once inviting and threatening”, as Jonas puts it19. “Appetition is
the form which the basic self-concern of all life assumes”. Selves,
as a condition of existence, must continuously enforce and mend
the boundary between self and environment. In the closely related
concept of autopoiesis22, systems continuously construct themselves
and define their own relations to the environment. Damasio has
traced a gradual progression of self-processes, from protoself to core
self to autobiographical self, with each advancing stage explained by
specific brain–body architectures and the processes they execute.
Running throughout the progression of self-processes is the theme
of homeostatic life regulation (see, for example, ref. 1).
Ultimately, we aim to produce machines that make decisions
and control behaviours under the guidance of feeling equivalents.
We envision these machines achieving a level of adaptiveness and
resilience beyond today’s ‘autonomous’ robots. Rather than having
to hard-code a robot for every eventuality or equip it with a limited
set of behavioural policies, a robot concerned with its own survival
might creatively solve the challenges that it encounters. These robots
would interact with and learn about the environment from an inter-
nally generated perspective of self-preservation. Basic goals and val-
ues would be organically discovered, rather than being extrinsically
designed. These survival-related behaviours could then be yoked to
useful human purposes.
Enabling technologies
In order to realize this proposal for a new class of homeostatic
machines endowed with equivalents to feelings, we will integrate
recent developments from two fields: soft robotics and multisensory
abstraction.
Soft robotics. The component structures of living organisms are
themselves living and carry their own homeostatic imperatives.
Living organisms are composed of living organs and tissues that
are in turn composed of living cells. Each level participates in its
own self-maintenance, sensing and signalling the state of its life
process. These nested levels of material self-concern have not yet
found expression in machines. At the intermediate level of tissues,
however, the latest developments in soft materials should allow us to
design, to some degree, ‘imitations’ of nature.
Why soft materials? The majority of today’s robots are con-
structed with materials of convenience. What is so different about
blob-bot as compared to metal-bot? Consider the ‘life’ of a piece of
sheet metal bent into a boxy robot. In general, metal is so durable in
447
Perspective NATUre MAchIne InTellIgence

A B

C D

Homeostat module A If V deviates from

its null value > e
uniselector advances

Uniselector

Output
cap to other
acit A
anc Homeostat
e modules
element
resistance (pivoting Position
magnet) of the plate
B determines
ry
tte voltage to
Ba uniselector
Summed
effect of coil and to A coils
C
magnetic fields of other modules
on pivoting
D magnet

Coils

Wires from other modules (inputs)

Fig. 1 | Ashby’s homeostat of 1954 exhibited some self-restoring stability. Composed of four identical electrical-magnetic modules, each exerting effects
on the others, the system executed a search for a globally stable state when the voltage (V) of one module exceeded some critical value of error (e) from
the null state. Reproduced from ref. 9, Taylor & Francis.

comparison to its niche—our human environment—that its integ-
rity and viability is not a consideration. This is why metals and hard
plastics are ubiquitous in robotics: precisely so that, in most cases,
material integrity can be safely assumed.
Yet durability comes at a cost. An invulnerable material has
nothing to say about its well-being. It rarely encounters existential
threats. If we imagine strain gauges embedded throughout a hard
surface, they would spend most of their time reporting ‘no change’.
The hard knocks of life accumulate until finally a catastrophic fail-
ure occurs, and the sensors cry out in unison. The rigid robot pres-
ents a monolithic and implacable face to the world, unfeeling by
design, its function decoupled from its constitution.
Soft robots, on the other hand, more readily enter into a
graceful and sensitive coupling with the environment (Fig. 2a;
see reviews23–28). Beginning with vulnerability as a design principle
for robots, we propose to extend it down to the very stuff out of
which the robot is made. Continuing the example we advanced
earlier, the same strain gauges embedded in the volume of a soft
material can localize forces and signal graded disruptions in body
surface continuity, such as those caused by punctures and tears.
As a realized example, Markvicka et  al.29 fabricated a soft elec-
tronic ‘skin’ that localizes and can trigger responses to damage.
They impregnated an elastomer base with droplets of liquid metal
that, on rupture, cause changes in electrical conductivity across the
damaged surface.
This is not to say that soft materials are necessarily weaker or
less resistant to mechanical damage than hard materials30. Soft mat-
ter admits of greater complexity and of more ways to regulate and
be regulated. Soft materials accommodate themselves to objects
rather than shoving objects aside. Under stress, they deform with-
out breaking, then enter dysfunction or gradual decline instead of
suffering sudden catastrophic failures. In many cases, soft materials
can self-heal, regaining much, if not all, of their pre-injury struc-
tural and electrical properties (reviewed in refs. 31,32). In a coup of
engineering, Cao et  al.33 demonstrated an electronic gel skin that
can self-heal after a cut (via ionic interactions); can sense touch,
pressure, and strain; and function in wet or dry conditions!
Soft materials have continuously varying morphology, with more
points of contact, control and force dispersion. They densely sam-
ple the environment across multiple modalities, including pressure,
stretch, temperature and energy level, and return rich information
about the evolving interaction. While not sufficient to generate feel-
ing on its own, soft matter is more likely to naturally create the kind
of relationship that, we expect, admits of an approximation to feeling.
As an example, consider the robotic octopus arm constructed of
silicone and actuated by tendons34 (Fig. 2b). It executes an envelop-
ing, coiled grip on an irregular surface not by calculating an analyti-
cal solution of applied torques to each of its microscopic ‘joints’, but
rather by conforming itself to the object. To some extent, it holds
by allowing itself to be held. Its grip on the world is achieved not by

448 Nature Machine Intelligence | VOL 1 | OCTOBER 2019 | 446–452 | www.nature.com/natmachintell

NATUre MAchIne InTellIgence Perspective
a b

300 µm

Hair shaft
0.5 mm
5 mm
Sweat pore
Dermal papilla
Meissner’s corpuscle
(tactile corpuscle)

Stratum corneum
Pigment layer Epidermis
Stratum germinativum
Stratum spinosum
Stratum basale
2 cm 500 µm Dermis
Arrector pili muscle
Sebaceous gland
Hair follicle

Papilla of hair
Subcutis
Nerve fiber
(hypodermis)

1 cm
LM Elastomer Vein
droplet matrix Artery
Blood and
lymph vessels

Sweat gland
Conductive
LM network Pacinian corpuscle

Conductive LM network

Indication
of damage

Fig. 2 | Artificial and natural soft materials. a, Soft electronics can be embedded on flexible and stretchable substrates. LM, liquid metal. b, Soft robotic
effectors grip by conforming to the object. c, Human skin contains dense embeddings of sensors and effectors for the maintenance of its own integrity.
Reproduced from ref. 23, AAAS (a, top three rows); ref. 29, Wiley (a, bottom row); and ref. 24, Elsevier (b). Credit: National Cancer Institute (c).

high-level object cognition but by its own material properties. To a
considerable extent, so is feeling in biological creatures.
The sensors of a living organism are themselves alive and vulner-
able to the conditions they are sensing. The retina is not an indiffer-
ent piece of silicon, but a curved sheet of photoreceptor cells resting
on a bed of capillaries, all bathed in a saline jelly, surrounded by
pain sensors and defended by an ultra-rapidly deploying physical
barrier: the eyelid.
To take another example from biology, consider the near-mirac-
ulous material called skin (Fig. 2c). In its totality, the skin is the
largest of the viscera in the human organism, and contains dense
embeddings of sensory, motor, nutrient exchange and self-repair
systems. Furthermore, the individual cells comprising the skin not
only contain their own life-maintenance systems, as all other vis-
cera do, but skin cells also register itch, pain, temperature, stretch,
vibration and pressure, thus constituting the interface between self
and world. And yet the skin is exquisitely vulnerable. A tiny insect’s
jaws can breach the skin and create a large disturbance to the organ-
ism. In fact, this literal hair-trigger sensitivity is one of the ‘pur-
poses’ of skin. The skin’s registration and amplification of signals
of attack, a loved one’s caresses or the sun’s rays, provides critical
information regarding the ongoing governance of life. Things can
go well or very badly for soft materials, in more and more interest-
ing ways than for hard matter.
Softness can be computationally modelled as a mesh or lattice
of small enough components interacting in large enough numbers.
The main challenge is to simulate the material at a high enough
resolution for softness to be able to emerge while remaining com-
putationally tractable. Efficient algorithms have been developed
to model the dynamics of soft robots35,36, even when composed of

Nature Machine Intelligence | VOL 1 | OCTOBER 2019 | 446–452 | www.nature.com/natmachintell 449

Perspective
heterogeneous materials37. Evolutionary algorithms have also been
applied to the problem of generating soft robot morphologies and
the corresponding motor patterns38. The vast expansion of degrees
of movement freedom in soft robots parallels a vast expansion of
sensitivity and control. The ensuing complexity of simulation is well
worth it because soft materials present a larger opportunity space
for maintenance and upkeep—a larger stage for a model of homeo-
stasis and feelings to play out on.
We would also call attention to the interesting case of biohybrid
systems, which integrate conventional or soft robotic materials with
engineered cells (reviewed in ref. 39). Muscle tissues may be inte-
grated into miniature robots for small-scale actuation, or bacterial
cells into hydrogels for long-term sensing and computing40. The
caveat, however, is that adding living cells or tissues to more conven-
tional materials may muddy the waters in the goal of understanding
the principles behind feeling machines. Putting chunks of biological
matter in machines may very well get us some softness and feeling
‘for free’, without explicitly modelling them.
Computing cross-modal associations. The dream of building a
robot with a homeostatic self-representation would present a com-
plex exercise in machine learning but it could draw on neuroscience
facts and theory—for example, on a neuro-architectural frame-
work originally proposed in 198941,42. According to this framework,
sensory inputs coalesce into abstract concepts by being progres-
sively remapped in a neural hierarchical fashion, with each higher
level registering more complex features. Nodes in each level also
re-instantiate their lower-level constituent features by top-down
projections. This convergence–divergence architecture can form
representations that bridge across the sensory modalities43,44.
There is an intriguing correspondence between the biologically
implemented convergence–divergence architecture and some vari-
ants of deep neural networks. Deep Boltzmann machines45 (DBMs;
introduced in refs. 46,47), for example, learn hierarchical representa-
tions of sensory inputs in a stepwise manner, with increasingly com-
plex internal features acquired as the hierarchy is climbed. DBMs
are also generative in that they attempt to reconstruct, at each level
back down the hierarchy, the learned features and ultimately the
original pattern of sensory energy corresponding to the stimulus.
Visual recognition of written digits was one of the earliest practi-
cal uses of neural networks48, with auditory speech recognition of
digits following somewhat later49. Today’s networks can learn rep-
resentations that bridge across the auditory and visual modalities
to perform cross-modal recognition. Ngiam et al.50 used DBMs and
autoencoders to perform audiovisual speech recognition, training
on auditory data to recognize the corresponding videos of lip move-
ments. Recognition of objects across the auditory and visual modal-
ities followed soon after51. Curiously, audiovisual-invariant object
representations were discovered in the human brain around the
same period52. Other modalities have since joined the algorithmic
fray, including the significant combination of vision with motor and
touch modalities53. Keeping pace with the algorithms, the human
brain has been mapped for cross-modal correspondences among
vision and touch54, and among vision, hearing and touch55.
Crucially, cross-modal processing is not limited to combinations
of external (exteroceptive) sensory modalities, but can also accom-
modate the internal (proprioceptive and interoceptive) modalities.
Damasio56 has proposed that a key to generating a self-perspective
is the integration of exteroceptive information (from visual cortices,
for example) with information from sensory portals (such as the
frontal eye fields) and the musculoskeletal frame, which provides a
stable anchor for the evolving sensory processing.
We suggest that deep neural networks are poised to tackle the
next great challenge of building correspondences between inner
space and outer space, between internal homeostatic data and
external sense data. A machine constructed of soft and sensitive
450 Nature Machine Intelligence | VOL 1 | OCTOBER 2019 | 446–452 | www.nature.com/natmachintell
NATUre MAchIne InTellIgence
tissues and in charge of its own self-regulation will have a wealth of
internal data on which to draw to inform its plans and perceptions.
A proposal has been made that the feeling of existence itself, or of
conscious presence, may be due to predictive coding of internal sen-
sations57. The homeostatic robot will process information with the
aid of something akin to feeling. How does the colour, taste and
texture, say, of an apple, systematically associate with changes to the
ongoing management of life? All of which is to say that the question
‘how does this make you feel?’ might be asked of machines.
Questions and objections
We already have our hands full teaching robots to drive our cars and
sweep our floors. Why add new failure modes? Why worry about
the Roomba catching a cold? The prospect of adding vulnerability
and self-interest to robots provokes a set of common concerns. We
attempt to address them here.
Reward, reinforcement and overhead costs of homeostasis. The
addition of physical vulnerability opens the robot’s behaviour to new
richness. We use the body to implicitly compute a high-dimensional
reward function, for which an explicit analytical solution is out of
reach. Reward functions are employed in reinforcement learning
(RL), a computational framework that originated from the behav-
iourist tradition of psychology. In computational studies, RL can be
used to train a system to perform a complex, multi-step behaviour
by designing an appropriate reward function for it to maximize. A
chief difficulty is to define the reward function with enough speci-
ficity to bring about the intended goal state. Another difficulty is
the requirement of enormous amounts of experiential data—on the
order of millions of trials and errors—to learn complex behaviour.
Machines can acquire vast experience in accelerated computer sim-
ulations, but this is not possible for organisms constrained by the
material and temporal limits of physical reality.
We regard RL as a powerful tool for certain classes of prob-
lems, but RL in general should not be confused or identified with
a homeostatic system architecture. We specify a particular target
for optimization (homeostatic well-being) and build in a necessary
linkage to the physical integrity of the body. In so doing, we hope to
reframe terms used by RL practitioners such as reward, punishment
and motivation, which, for the most part, lack grounding in biologi-
cal and phenomenological reality.
On this point, we are encouraged by a strain of computational
work58–60 that builds bridges between organism homeostasis, emo-
tions and RL (see ref. 61). Keramati and Gutkin60 mathematically
model RL as the traversal of a multidimensional homeostatic space,
in which each dimension corresponds to a physiological parameter
and has an optimal value. Reward, in this perspective, is not identi-
fied with bonbons or dollars or videogame points, but rather with
anything that moves the agent towards the location in homeostatic
space that minimizes distance to the various optima. As a reviewer
of Keramati and Gutkin’s work put it, this makes “reinforcement
learning accountable to homeostatic imperatives.” Recent work has
extended this homeostatic RL framework to address high-level cog-
nitive, social and economic behaviours62, and considered its relation
to active inference63.
The well-behaved robot. We aim to build robots with a sense of
self-preservation. What could possibly go wrong with such an
endeavour? Stories about robots often end poorly for their human
creators. We seem to be unsettled by the moral status of artefacts
imbued with lifelike qualities. If a genuinely feeling machine’s exis-
tence would be threatened by humans, would it necessarily respond
in violent self-defence? We suggest not, provided, for example, that
in addition to having access to its own feelings, it would be able to
know about the feelings of others—that is, if it would be endowed
with empathy. For some of the problems arising from giving some
NATUre MAchIne InTellIgence
feelings to robots, we might attempt to solve them by giving robots
more feelings rather than by suppressing them.
We subscribe to a naturalistic account of morality in which behav-
iours are guided by moral deliberation. Johnson64 argues that moral
deliberation involves imagining the consequences of our actions on
ourselves and others, and consciously feeling those consequences.
Levy65 goes further, arguing that consciousness is required for moral
responsibility. A necessary precondition for the attribution of moral
responsibility is awareness of the facts and conditions giving our
actions their moral significance. Feelings are responsible for intro-
ducing in the mind the relevant facts of the body. Assuming a robot
already capable of genuine feeling, an obligatory link between its
feelings and those of others would result in its ethical and sociable
behaviour. As a starting point, we propose two provisional rules for
a well-behaved robot: (1) feel good; (2) feel empathy.
The machine is capable of feeling well or ill, but in accordance
with rule 1 pursues homeostatic well-being—that is, feeling good.
The second rule, enforcing empathy, would make a robot feel the
pleasure and pain of others as its own (though not necessarily at
full strength). The two rules cycle into and reinforce each other.
Empathy acts as a governor on self-interest and as a reinforcer of
pro-social behaviour. Actions that harm others will be felt as if harm
occurred to the self, whereas actions that improve the well-being of
others will benefit the self.
We are certain that our two rules would eventually get caught
in unexpected tangles, but such is the nature of moral decision-
making, which is characterized by difficult choices, contingency on
circumstances, resistance to rational maximization and guidance by
strong yet inarticulable or hidden feelings. What people do not typi-
cally do is get stuck in infinite loops of ‘moral’ reasoning, or cause
havoc by following strict rules to a bloody end.
Sufficiently advanced AIs have been characterized, unfairly we
think, as necessarily devious, paranoid and acquisitive. Their “basic
AI drives”66 of self-protection would entail a will to power. But this
is not an empirically justified entailment of intelligence. We can just
as easily imagine a fully enlightened and withdrawn ‘ascetic’ AI, as
we can a demonic maximizer. Our present understanding of the
relationship between intelligence and personality cannot yet adju-
dicate these positions67.
We hope for this section to serve as a preliminary prompt to
necessary future discussions on robot ethics. Feeling robots should
implement moral deliberation in the way that humans do: as feel-
ing-oriented problem-solving, taking into account the feelings
of others. Robots might have even fewer impediments to moral
behaviour than humans do—for example, those impediments we
inherit from history, culture or biological impulses, which can be
engineered out of a robot. Morally perfect behaviour, in robots or
otherwise, is likely to be incoherent or unattainable, but moral prog-
ress is possible.
But is it the real thing?. Would a homeostatic robot be, at best, a
simulacrum, replicating some of the behaviours and mechanisms
of living organisms but missing a key ingredient of the real thing?
Is the ‘wet’ biochemistry of cellular tissue required for authentic
homeostasis and for the mental experience we call feeling? These
are important and open questions (Box 1). Can all mental phenom-
ena be reduced to information processing, implementable on any
arbitrary computing medium? A computer simulation of a hurri-
cane won’t get us wet68, but might simulation of thought, itself being
information processing, result in real thinking?
Here we must entertain the possibility that true feeling—the sort
of mental state that humans experience when we feel—may indeed
be restricted to wet biological tissue and may not be realizable on
non-living artefacts. The wetness hypothesis predicts that the poten-
tially crucial mechanisms behind feeling are impossible to realize
in alternative materials, due to their lack of the physicochemical
Nature Machine Intelligence | VOL 1 | OCTOBER 2019 | 446–452 | www.nature.com/natmachintell
Perspective
Box 1 | Feeling machines as a research platform
The initial goal of the introduction of physical vulnerability and
self-determined self-regulation is not to create robots with au-
thentic feeling, but rather to improve their functionality across
a wide range of environments. As a second goal, introducing
this new class of machines would constitute a scientific platform
for experimentation on robotic brain–body architectures. This
platform would open the possibility of investigating important
research questions:
• What are the specific expansions of intelligence and cogni-
tive capacity achieved by the addition of homeostatic design
and affective processing?
• What is the role of cultural transmission and collective prob-
lem-solving in societies of homeostatic robots?
• To what extent is the appearance of feeling and consciousness
dependent on a material substrate?
properties necessary to replicate the causal chain of events. Models
and simulations of the crucial mechanism would be useful maps of
the territory, but would not usually replicate the causal structure in
a way that is grounded in reality.
Just as importantly, the possession of genuine feeling, however
defined or verified, may not be necessary to the practical goal
of enhancing robot behaviour. At present, the wetness hypothesis
for genuine feelings is untested and untestable. The realness of a
thing is tricky to establish when the thing is subjective. Testability
may ultimately be a distraction from the task currently at hand,
which is to model the thing better and gain an additional under-
standing of it. As models continue to improve, it is conceivable that
they would become instantiations of the modelled phenomena. At
some level of detail the map might become indistinguishable from
the territory.
Conclusion
We suggest that the artificial agent’s survival should be implemented
as a problem to be solved in its own right. The machine’s constitu-
tion and viability states have not yet been exploited as an internal
source of rich and highly relevant data. The incorporation of soft
tissues embedded with sensors and effectors into robots will provide
a source of multimodal homeostatic data. Cross-modal algorithms
will build abstract associations between the objects of the world and
their multidimensional effects on homeostasis. Homeostatic robots
might reap behavioural benefits by acting as if they have feeling.
Even if they would never achieve full-blown inner experience in the
human sense, their properly motivated behaviour would result in
expanded intelligence and better-behaved autonomy.
Received: 29 April 2019; Accepted: 4 September 2019;
Published online: 9 October 2019
References
1. Damasio, A. The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of
Cultures (Pantheon, 2018).
2. Friston, K. The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nat. Rev.
Neurosci. 11, 127–38 (2010).
3. Kolchinsky, A. & Wolpert, D. H. Semantic information, autonomous agency
and non-equilibrium statistical physics. Interface Focus 8, 20180041 (2018).
4. Kiverstein, J. D. & Rietveld, E. Reconceiving representation-hungry cognition:
an ecological-enactive proposal. Adapt. Behav. 26, 147–163 (2018).
5. Shannon, C. E. The mathematical theory of communication. Bell Syst. Tech. J.
27, 379–423 (1948).
6. Anderson, M. L. Embodied cognition: a field guide. Artif. Intell. 149,
91–130 (2003).
7. Froese, T. & Ziemke, T. Enactive artificial intelligence: investigating the
systemic organization of life and mind. Artif. Intell. 173, 466–500 (2009).
451
Perspective
8. Seth, A. K. & Tsakiris, M. Being a beast machine: the somatic basis of
selfhood. Trends Cogn. Sci. 969–981 (2018).
9. Cariani, P. A. The homeostat as embodiment of adaptive control. Int. J. Gen.
Syst. 38, 139–154 (2009).
10. Walter, W. G. An imitation of life. Sci. Am. 182, 42–45 (1950).
11. Holland, O. E. in Artificial Life V: Proceedings of the 5th International
Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (eds Langton, C.
G. & Shimohara, K.) 34–44 (MIT Press, 1997).
12. Brooks, R. A. New approaches to robotics. Science 253, 1227–1232 (1991).
13. Bongard, J. & Lipson, H. Evolved machines shed light on robustness and
resilience. Proc. IEEE 102, 899–914 (2014).
14. Parisi, D. Internal robotics. Conn. Sci. 16, 325–338 (2004).
15. Doya, K. & Uchibe, E. The cyber rodent project: exploration of adaptive
mechanisms for self-preservation and self-reproduction. Adapt. Behav. 13,
149–160 (2005).
16. Di Paolo, E. Homeostatic adaptation to inversion of the visual field and other
sensorimotor disruptions. Proc. Simul. Adapt. Behav. 440–449 (2000).
17. Parisi, D. & Petrosino, G. Robots that have emotions. Adapt. Behav. 18,
453–469 (2010).
18. Breazeal, C. Emotion and sociable humanoid robots. Int. J. Hum. Comput.
Stud. 59, 119–155 (2003).
19. Jonas, H. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology
(Northwestern Univ. Press, 1966).
20. Di Paolo, E. in Dynamical Systems Approach to Embodiment and Sociality (eds
Murase, K. & Asakura, T.) 19–42 (Advanced Knowledge International, 2003).
21. Legg, S. & Hutter, M. Universal intelligence: a definition of machine
intelligence. Minds Mach. 17, 391–444 (2007).
22. Maturana, H. R. & Varela, F. J. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of
the Living (Springer, 1991).
23. Rogers, J. A., Someya, T. & Huang, Y. Materials and mechanics for stretchable
electronics. Science 327, 1603–1607 (2010).
24. Kim, S., Laschi, C. & Trimmer, B. Soft robotics: a bioinspired evolution in
robotics. Trends Biotechnol. 31, 287–294 (2013).
25. Majidi, C. Soft robotics: a perspective—current trends and prospects for the
future. Soft Robot. 1, 5–11 (2014).
26. Lu, N. & Kim, D.-H. Flexible and stretchable electronics paving the way for
soft robotics. Soft Robot. 1, 53–62 (2014).
27. Pfeifer, R., Iida, F. & Lungarella, M. Cognition from the bottom up: on
biological inspiration, body morphology, and soft materials. Trends Cogn. Sci.
18, 404–413 (2014).
28. Rus, D. & Tolley, M. T. Design, fabrication and control of soft robots. Nature
521, 467–475 (2015).
29. Markvicka, E. J., Tutika, R., Bartlett, M. D. & Majidi, C. Soft electronic skin
for multi‐site damage detection and localization. Adv. Funct. Mater. 29,
1900160 (2019).
30. Martinez, R. V., Glavan, A. C., Keplinger, C., Oyetibo, A. I. & Whitesides,
G. M. Soft actuators and robots that are resistant to mechanical damage.
Adv. Funct. Mater. 24, 3003–3010 (2014).
31. Kang, J., Tok, J. B. H. & Bao, Z. Self-healing soft electronics. Nat. Electron. 2,
144–150 (2019).
32. Bartlett, M. D., Dickey, M. D. & Majidi, C. Self-healing materials for
soft-matter machines and electronics. npg Asia Mater. 11, 19–22 (2019).
33. Cao, Y. et al. Self-healing electronic skins for aquatic environments. Nat.
Electron. 2, 75–82 (2019).
34. Laschi, C. et al. Soft robot arm inspired by the octopus. Adv. Robot. 26,
709–727 (2012).
35. Duriez, C. in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
3982–3987 (IEEE, 2013).
36. Goldberg, N. N. et al. On planar discrete elastic rod models for the
locomotion of soft robots. Soft Robot. https://doi.org/10.1089/soro.2018.0104
(2019).
37. Hiller, J. & Lipson, H. Dynamic simulation of soft multimaterial 3D-printed
objects. Soft Robot. 1, 88–101 (2014).
38. Rieffel, J., Knox, D., Smith, S. & Trimmer, B. Growing and evolving soft
robots. Artif. Life 20, 143–162 (2014).
39. Ricotti, L. et al. Biohybrid actuators for robotics: a review of devices actuated
by living cells. Sci. Robot. 2, eaaq0495 (2017).
40. Liu, X. et al. Stretchable living materials and devices with hydrogel–elastomer
hybrids hosting programmed cells. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114,
2200–2205 (2017).
41. Damasio, A. The brain binds entities and events by multiregional activation
from convergence zones. Neural Comput. 1, 123–132 (1989).
42. Damasio, A. Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: a systems-level
proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition. Cognition 33,
25–62 (1989).
452 Nature Machine Intelligence | VOL 1 | OCTOBER 2019 | 446–452 | www.nature.com/natmachintell
NATUre MAchIne InTellIgence
43. Meyer, K. & Damasio, A. Convergence and divergence in a neural
architecture for recognition and memory. Trends Neurosci. 32, 376–82 (2009).
44. Man, K., Kaplan, J., Damasio, H. & Damasio, A. Neural convergence and
divergence in the mammalian cerebral cortex: from experimental neuroanatomy
to functional neuroimaging. J. Comp. Neurol. 521, 4097–4111 (2013).
45. Salakhutdinov, R. & Hinton, G. Deep Boltzmann machines. Artif. Intell. Stat.
5, 448–455 (2009).
46. Hinton, G. E. & Sejnowski, T. J. Optimal perceptual inference. in Proceedings
of the IEEE conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 448–453
(IEEE, 1983).
47. Ackley, D., Hinton, G. & Sejnowski, T. A learning algorithm for Boltzmann
machines. Cogn. Sci. 9, 147–169 (1985).
48. LeCun, Y. et al. Backpropagation applied to handwritten zip code recognition.
Neural Comput. 1, 541–551 (1989).
49. Graves, A., Eck, D., Beringer, N. & Schmidhuber, J. in Biologically Inspired
Approaches to Advanced Information Technology (eds Ijspeert, A. J., Murata,
M. & Wakamiya, N.) 127–136 (Springer, 2003).
50. Ngiam, J., Khosla, A. & Kim, M. Multimodal deep learning. In Proc. 28th
International Conference on Maching Learning (eds Getoor, L. & Scheffer, T.)
689–696 (2011).
51. Aytar, Y., Vondrick, C. & Torralba, A. SoundNet: learning sound
representations from unlabeled video. In Proc. 30th International Conference
on Neural Information Processing Systems 892–900 (NIPS, 2016).
52. Man, K., Kaplan, J. T., Damasio, A. & Meyer, K. Sight and sound
converge to form modality-invariant representations in temporoparietal
cortex. J. Neurosci. 32, 16629–36 (2012).
53. Lenz, I., Lee, H. & Saxena, A. Deep learning for detecting robotic grasps.
Int. J. Rob. Res. 34, 705–724 (2015).
54. Oosterhof, N. N., Wiggett, A. J., Diedrichsen, J., Tipper, S. P. & Downing, P.
E. Surface-based information mapping reveals crossmodal vision-action
representations in human parietal and occipitotemporal cortex.
J. Neurophysiol. 104, 1077–89 (2010).
55. Man, K., Damasio, A., Meyer, K. & Kaplan, J. T. Convergent and invariant
object representations for sight, sound, and touch. Hum. Brain Mapp. 36,
3629–3640 (2015).
56. Damasio, A. Self Comes to Mind (Pantheon, 2010).
57. Seth, A. K., Suzuki, K. & Critchley, H. D. An interoceptive predictive coding
model of conscious presence. Front. Psychol. 2, 395 (2012).
58. Bersini, H. in Proc. Third International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive
Behaviour 325–333 (MIT Press-Bradford Books, 1994).
59. Konidaris, G. & Barto, A. in From Animals to Animats 9 (ed. Nolfi, S.)
346–356 (Springer, 2006).
60. Keramati, M. & Gutkin, B. Homeostatic reinforcement learning for integrating
reward collection and physiological stability. eLife 3, e04811 (2014).
61. Moerland, T. M., Broekens, J. & Jonker, C. M. Emotion in reinforcement
learning agents and robots: a survey. Mach. Learning 107, 443–480 (2018).
62. Juechems, K. & Summerfield, C. Where does value come from? Preprint at
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rxf7e (2019).
63. Morville, T., Friston, K., Burdakov, D., Siebner, H. R. & Hulme, O. J. The
homeostatic logic of reward. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.1101/242974 (2018).
64. Johnson, M. Morality for Humans (Univ. Chicago Press, 2014).
65. Levy, N. Consciousness and Moral Responsibility (Oxford Univ. Press, 2014).
66. Omohundro, S. M. The basic AI drives. In Proc. 2008 Conference on Artificial
General Intelligence 483–492 (ACM, 2008).
67. DeYoung, C. G. in The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence 711–737
(Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012).
68. Searle, J. R. Minds, brains and programs. Behav. Brain Sci. 3, 417–457 (1980).
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to H. Damasio for comments on this Perspective. This work was
supported by grants from the Berggruen Foundation and the Templeton World Charity
Foundation to A.D.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Correspondence should be addressed to K.M. or A.D.
Reprints and permissions information is available at www.nature.com/reprints.
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional affiliations.
© Springer Nature Limited 2019