Falling in love with machine: emotive potentials between human and robots in science fiction and reality

The rapid development of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) has dramatically changed human society, facilitating travels and interactions worldwide and, in the meanwhile, increasingly propelling human beings to withdraw to their own worlds. It is foreseeable that humans are likely to become growingly dependent on robots to fulfill psychological and emotional needs. In real scientific world, scientists and engineers in America, Japan, South Korea, China and elsewhere are making increasingly smarter robots (or cyborgs) capable of understanding and expressing human senses and emotions. In the ever cyborgized era of posthumanism, the dividing line between human and robot is becoming blurred. We have to rethink humans’ position in the world, to reassess the harmful idea of anthropocentrism and to learn to live with non-human in a symbiotic relationship. Technologies such as voice recognition, facial recognition and deep learning all accelerate the socialization of robots that show personal characters. This article focuses on the representations of human-robot emotions and emotional communications in recent science fictions and science fiction (SF) movies to explore how this relationship is imagined as a means to reflect on the ethical and technological challenges of this controversial issue both in fictional and real lives. This article also discusses the possibility of emotional/affective robots in the future, probing into the complicated entanglement of humanity and post-humanity.