Did that hurt? Good.

Feeling pain is a very important thing for us humans and animals in general. Even though it is not a pleasant experience, it allows us to protect ourselves and take good care of our bodies. The feeling of pain signals a creature that something is wrong withing their body, or that it's damaging them. This unpleasent feeling sparks a reaction to either fix it, or stop the damage from happening. 

Artificial creatures on the other hand, generally don't have the ability to feel pain, and most certainly not in the way that we do.  On one hand, this is very useful, because it allows us to use robots in dangerous situations, to make them perform tasks that could range between unpleasant and most likely fatal to a human being. Take for instance the video on the right, that humanizes a Roomba by making it scream whenever it bumps into something. 

For scientists this is an interesting topic, and they have spent a lot of time trying to make them feel (something like) pain. When they are able to feel pain inflicted by the physical world around them, they can learn the limits of their own system. Combining this kind of physical system with a self-learning AI might provide a huge leap in development of human-like robotics. 

Besides developing the sensory technology needed to make a robot "feel" pain, the way it is processed by an artificial creature is also of  great importance. Scientists and artists have therefore combined forces on multiple occasions, to discover what we can learn from making robots feel pain, and how that influences our own understandings of physical touch, pain, and human-robot interactions.

Take for instance the robot shown on the left, that responds with facial expressions to physical pressure inflicted on a sensor. The idea of the researchers in this project is that this, in the future, might allow robots to better empathize with humans. 

Another different perspective is a research carried out by Toyohashi University of Technology and Kyoto University. They watned to understand how humans interact with robots socially. They showed participants of the study pictures of either a human or a robot hand in painful and non-painful situations, and used an EEG to analyse their responses. They found that when participants were confrontend with robots in perceived pain, the brain had the same reaction pattern as they would have when observing a human in that situation. This shows that humans are also very likely to anthropomorphise robots to the sense that they feel empathy for them, and don't want them to be harmed.