The next big breakthrough in artificial intelligence could come from giving machines not j

ust more logical capacity, but emotional capacity as well.

Feelings aren't usually associated with inanimate machines, but Rosalind Picard, a professor of computer technology at MIT, believes emotion may be just the thing computers need to work effectively. Computers need artificial emotion to understand their human users better and to achieve self-analysis and self-improvement.

The more scientists study the "wetware" model for computing—the human brain and nervous system—the more they conclude that emotions are a part of intelligence, not separate from it. Emotions are among the tools that we use to process the tremendous amount of stimuli in our environment. They also pay a role in human learning and decision making. Feeling bad about a wrong decision, for instance, focuses attention on avoiding future error. A feeling of pleasure, on the other hand, positively reinforces an experience.

"If we want computers to be genuinely intelligent, to adapt to us, and to interact naturally with us, then they will need the ability to recognize and express emotions, to have emotions, and to have what has come to be called 'emotional intelligence,'" Picard says.

One way that emotions can help computers, she suggests, is by helping keep them from crashing. Today's computers produce error messages, but they do not have a "gut feeling" of knowing when something is wrong or doesn't make sense. A healthy fear of death could motivate a computer to stop trouble as soon as it starts. On the other hand, self-preservation would need to be subordinate to service to humans. It was fear of its own death that prompted HAL, the fictional computer in the film 2002: A Space Odyssey, to kill most of its human associates.

Similarly, computers that could "read" their users would accumulate a store of highly personal information about us—not just what we said and did, but what we likely thought and felt.

"Emotions not only contribute to a richer quality of interaction, but they directly impact a person's ability to interact in an intelligent way," Picard says. "Emotional skills, especially the ability to recognize and express emotions, are essential for natural communication with humans."

In the future computers will tend to be made ______.

A．fictional

B．humanized

C．economical

D．operational