Fear!

Don't you recognise this feeling? The feeling from when you were a child, having to turn off the lights and running up the stairs to the safe space in your bed. Being afraid of whatever lurks in the dark behind you, too afraid to look around? That's fear! If you've experienced this before, congratulations, you appear to be human!

Being afraid isn't something that's exclusive to us humans, it plays an important role in the animal kingdom. Fear is an innate and powerful emotion in response to perceived threats or danger. Prey animals are afraid of hunters. It changes our behaviour in a way to avoid getting unalived (dead). It is often characterized by an increased heart rate, sweating, trembling and heightened alertness. Fear can also be unrealistic. For instance, a fear of needles. In this case, the fear can be classified as a phobia.

Whilst fear is a common emotion in animals and humans, it's not something we see often in artificial creatures. When looking up examples, many examples can be found for humans being afraid of robots. However, the other way around is not too common.

What could it look like in an artificial creature?

When it comes to robots, the concept of fear becomes more complex. Robots themselves do not possess the ability to feel emotions in the way that humans do, so the best way to simulate fear in a robot is to have it respond to stimuli in a way that's similar to how humans (or other creatures) would. When creating an artificial creature that's able to communicate fear, you could do so in the following ways:

Reactive Behaviour

Robots don't inherently feel fear, but they can be programmed to show reflexive behaviours similar to a fear response. When using its sensors to detect something potentially dangerous it could trigger a defensive mechanism that causes the creature to retreat, scream, hide or shut down temporarily to protect itself.

Adaptive Learning

Robots could possess the ability to assess risks in their environment based on what they detect using their sensors. If possible, machine learning can be utilized in the detection of threats and it can be used to make the creature give an appropriate response.

Communicating Distress

Robots designed to communicate fear may be programmed to express distress or discomfort through non-verbal cues. For instance, it might display a sad smiley on a led matrix, be shaking or beeping SOS in Morse code. This could communicate to a human that the creature is in fact in distress.

For example...

Albert

Albert is an AI that uses deep reinforcement learning to escape its enclosure. In the process of learning it get subjected to a winning and a losing condition. In the process of escaping its enclosure it needs to avoid the moving beams, which give it a lower score. In turn, the AI tries to avoid the moving beams, becoming scared of them in a sense.