Computer Needs Emotion The next big breakthrough in artificial intelligence could come from giving machines not just more logical capacity, but emotional capacity as well. Feeling aren't usually associated with inanimate(无生命的) machines, but Posalind Picard, a professor of computer technology at MIT, believes emotion may be just the thing computes need to work effectively. Computers need artificial emotion both to understand their human users better and to achieve self-analysis and self-improvement, says Picard. '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 promoted RAL, the fictional computer in the film 2002:A Space Odyssey, to extermine (消灭) 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. 'Emotion not only contributes 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. ' According to Picard, emotion intelligence is necessary to computers because ______.