Reddit reviews The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind

And really, all of the cognitive scientists I know would yell at anyone who thinks computers can't (well, won't) do any of those things. Like Minksy said in an interview with Discover:

>What is the value in creating an artificial intelligence that thinks like a 3-year-old?

>The history of AI is sort of funny because the first real accomplishments were beautiful things, like a machine that could do proofs in logic or do well in a calculus course. But then we started to try to make machines that could answer questions about the simple kinds of stories that are in a first-grade reader book. There's no machine today that can do that. So AI researchers looked primarily at problems that people called hard, like playing chess, but they didn't get very far on problems people found easy. It's a sort of backwards evolution. I expect with our commonsense reasoning systems we'll start to make progress pretty soon if we can get funding for it. One problem is people are very skeptical about this kind of work.

For that matter, that whole interview was quite interesting, as was the book it was in reference to.

On the contrary. The Emotion Machine

By Marvin Minsky - he believes that we can program human emotions. I tend to agree with him.

Perhaps you might find Minsky's The Emotion Machine a worthy read. Proposes some ideas for how things like that could work.