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.
A completely opposite example is the robot shown on the left here. This robot has an arm equipped with a small pin. When a person lays their finger on the designated spot on the robot, an algorithm decides whether it will prick a person's finger. Artist Alexander Reben, the creator of the robot, designed it in such a way, that even he doesn't know whether the robot will or will not inflict pain on the participant. He made this robot to start a debate around author Isaac Aimov's "First Law of Robotics", which says a robot may not harm a human being, or allow a human being to be harmed by its inaction.
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.
All these artists and researchers have shown us very interesting takes on the relationship between artificial creatures and pain. There is no clear take in how robots should perceive pain both in themselves and in humans, but it is clear that it's a very important aspect of modern robotics. There are a lot of examples where robots would lose their use if they felt pain. At the same time, a lot of new uses and perspectives can be found when researching the interaction between humans, robots, and pain.