Putting emotion into a machine may seem elusive, unimaginable and maybe even impossible (but it isn't). Trying to do that feels close to putting a 'Ghost in the Machine'. But that is exactly what we went for because from our perspective you need a 'Ghost' to have understanding, insight, moral values even. Emotion becomes the driver for those things, as they are in humans.

Our moral and ethical rules are all fundamentally based on emotions. If you want a machine to 'understand' those rules, to act by them, it needs the emotional values that make those rules perceptible.

Machine Consciousness is a special area in the field of Artificial Intelligence research. Not much progress has been made here, although there are many books and papers written on the subject (including a paper by Hans Peter). There seems to be some sort of consensus in the field that Machine Consciousness might be the required property for both General Intelligence and safe intelligent machines.

Having technology like the ASTRID system brings great insights into these questions. We can see how emotional values spread through the ASTRID brain, not unlike 'spreading activation' in a human brain. Machine Consciousness might be just around the corner.

As far as we know, nobody in the Artificial Intelligence community has deemed Emotion fundamental for reasoning. There are projects that try to build 'affect' into robotics, trying to make robots appear (not actually be) friendly and understanding. Of course, this has nothing to do with 'understanding'.

However, in the field of Neural Science, research by several well-known scientists has shown that emotion might be instrumental in cognition, and even crucial for the ability to interact with the world. From this, it seems that research into the brain's mechanisms for emotion should be high on the agenda of every AI researcher and developer. Nothing seems further from reality, though.

When Hans Peter started the project, over a decade ago, he was convinced that emotion played a major role in cognition. When he modelled the ASTRID system, emotion became a fundamental property in the model. Over the years of development, this has shown to be an incredible important decision, as several arising questions about the model showed to be no issue at all because of the functional presence of emotion in the model.