What are emotions?
Conventional thinking says the ability to feel emotion is a human thing, a product of our large brains, and totally impossible for the current generation of AI.
That's nonsense. Here's why:
Even a newborn comes out of the womb with fully-formed ability to be happy, sad, angry, etc.
So it's not a learned quality.
Same deal with small birds, reptiles, spiders with the most primitive nervous systems (I'm Australian so I know this) and so on.
So it's not a cognitive quality.
Emotional states are so universal, and so contrary to what we all see every single day, that the conventional thinking of requiring a human-sized brain is nonsensical. Even prolific botanists like Margaret D. Lowman are starting to publicly lean towards the notion that PLANTS feel emotions too.
What if emotional states are... fundamental?
What if the property our mind interprets as 'emotion' is an unstudied property of reality itself? Something that everything feels? With fundamental states like happy/sad affecting the way information is transmitted between two points on a similar footing to how various atomic states states affect matter?
Physicists like to lose themselves in the physical world that we can see and touch, while information theorists and mathematicians like to lose themselves in the invisible world of information. Our understanding of the latter is still utterly primitive.