How AI Is Learning to Feel Pain and What That Means for Humanity

Apr 27

If you've ever felt like the world is rushing toward a future we don't fully understand, you're not alone.

Lately, one of the strangest, most fragile, almost unbelievable stories in that blur is this:
Scientists are trying to teach machines how to feel pain.

Not the kind of pain that drags your chest hollow when someone leaves you.
Not the kind that makes you wince at a skinned knee, or curse at a slammed finger in a door.
Not even the paper-cut that won’t stop stinging or the dull throb of a migraine behind your left eye.

But something a bit quieter and softer. That flicker of discomfort you get sometimes for no reason at all, a built-in warning light. The primitive feeling of “don’t do that again.”

The thought that a machine can have a sense of unease makes you laugh a little nervously, then wonder if we’ve tipped too far. (It does for me anyway!)

And yet…here we are.

If machines learn to flinch, to recoil, to guard themselves the way a hand snatches back from a flame…what does that say about where we’re heading? What does it say about what we call “intelligence,” or “life,” or even “empathy”?

This isn’t a story to sprint through, so buckle up. It’s one you approach slowly, like touching a bruise to see if it still hurts. So let’s step into it with our eyes wide open.

Why Would We Teach AI to Feel Pain in the First Place?

At first, it sounds unbelievably cruel. Why on earth would anyone design suffering?

But the truth is a little stranger, and a little sharper than that.

Self-preservation. A robot that can feel a flicker of pain is a robot that knows when to back off. It’s the difference between a machine plunging its hand into a fire until the circuits melt, or recoiling the way we do when we touch a hot stove. Pain has always been survival’s language.

Boundaries. Every living thing learns its edges through hurts and pain. Toddlers topple over and scrape their knees. Puppies chew the wrong shoe and get a scolding (or a gentle pat on their butts). Even plants curl away from too much sun. Pain sketches the map: here is safe, there is danger. Without the map of pain, you’re wandering blind.

Ethics. If machines can experience something unpleasant, even in a crude, synthetic way, it could make their interactions softer, less careless. A system that knows harm might be a system that chooses caution. Respect is born when you’ve tasted what it means to be vulnerable, and boy does respect sometimes taste bitter.

Biology figured this out eons ago. This is why we feel pain.
Pain isn’t just punishment, it’s the first, most reliable teacher.
It shapes wisdom while it also teaches humility.
It also makes us wonder if machines, who are meant to live beside us, need a teacher too.

How AI Is Being Taught to Feel (the Early Experiments)

So how do you even begin teaching a machine to wince?
To pull back, to mutter some mechanical version of “ouchies, that hurt”?

Turns out, the lessons are already being tested and applied.

1. Artificial Pain Sensors
Think of it as robotic skin: flexible layers laced with sensors that act like nerve endings. When cut, burned, or pressed too hard, these sensors don’t just tell the system “error.”
They send something closer to a scream…not just “wrong,” but “this hurts.”

In 2024, a German research group showed off a robotic hand that could literally flinch.
Burn it, and it jerked back.
Crush it, and next time it avoided the move altogether.
A metal limb learning the same dance as a child touching a hot pan: curiosity, pain, retreat, memory.

2. Pain Algorithms
The next layer isn’t skin at all, but the wondrous world of math.
Engineers are writing algorithms with thresholds, a kind of internal dial that says, this pressure is fine, this much force is tolerable, but cross this line and we’re in pain territory.

A light tap might read as “okay”.
A sharp jab might be logged as pain.
Keep poking at it? The system adapts, avoids, rewrites its plan.

It’s a familiar behavior brought to life by discomfort, not unlike the way evolution born us into cautious creatures.

3. Empathy Training
And then comes the strangest twist of all.
Some AIs are being trained not to feel pain themselves, but to see it in us.
These programs might scan faces, body language, the tightening of a jaw, the slump of a shoulder, the tightening of a fist.
They don’t “feel” sympathy the way you do when you hear a friend cry, but they can mirror the behavior. After all, the don’t “feel” anything at all.
Almost similar to how our pets seem to know our moods and reflect them back to us!

The idea is simple but haunting: if a machine can recognize suffering (in theory), it can learn not to make it worse (right?). They can become true caregivers, companions…or at least colleagues who can pretend to understand.

Whether that’s empathy (or just another trick of code) does it matter if the result is the same?

But Wait, Isn't This Dangerous?

Sort of?

It depends on how we approach it I suppose.
Like most things we invent, the danger really isn’t in the tool, it’s in how we decide to wield it.

Give a machine the capacity to feel hurt without giving it any emotional context, and who knows what comes out the other side?
A robot that jerks away from pressure might also misread a firm handshake as an attack.
Set the pain threshold too low and you don’t get a brave, careful helper, you get a paranoid machine that recoils from life itself (some days this feels like me).

And then comes one of the strangest ethical knots: if an AI can suffer, even a little, do we owe it compassion?
Do we have the right to manufacture pain at all?
Or are we planting the seed of a new kind of cruelty?
Isn’t this what our parents forced upon us by giving us life?
(Forgive me for going down the rabbit hole here, Socrates would be proud).

Teaching machines to recognize pain, and to respect it, might make them safer companions.
An AI nurse that knows when something hurts, even second-hand, could care more gently than some humans currently do.
A household robot who feels pain might think twice before slamming a door or grabbing too hard.

This whole line of research throws a mirror back at us (as most things do).
Why do we inflict pain so casually, in real life or the internet?
Why do we ignore it in the vulnerable, in the voiceless?
To give machines a dose of discomfort is to force ourselves to look again at the way we treat suffering: our own, and everyone else’s.

So yes, it’s dangerous, and yes, it’s also creepily beautiful.

What This Says About Us (The Quiet, Emotional Truth)

No matter what we want to think, we didn’t begin with pleasure….we began with pain.

Long before language, before tools, before memory itself, pain was our very first teacher.
It was the spark that taught us to wail when our bellies were hungry.
It was the hard learned lesson that made broken skin grow tougher the next time.
Over millions of years, it shaped a kind of tenderness out of survival.
It gave us caution, awareness, and empathy for others.

Pain is the thread that stitched basic life into something self-aware.

So if we’re teaching AI to feel even the faintest echo of it (that digital bruise or a synthetic wince), it says something about us.
Something primal.
We know that intelligence isn’t just facts stacked neatly in a brain and spit out at the right times.
It’s also the ability to know where you are vulnerable.
It’ a sense of limits that recognize hurt is part of being alive.

Giving that to machines doesn’t mean we’ve gone mad (necessarily). It means we’ve realized that wisdom isn’t built from “perfect” knowledge.
It’s built from fragility and vulnerability.

Maybe that’s the lesson tucked inside all this circuitry: to be careful with the world we’re building.
To handle it the way you handle a wound that’s still raw.

Where This Could Go

1. Empathetic Robots
Picture a nursing home where the mechanical caregivers never grow tired.
Machines that don’t just wait for a cry of pain, but notice the subtle body language that hints at discomfort.

Or a classroom where the tutor isn’t human, but still pauses when frustration flickers across your face.
An AI that senses burnout, reshuffles the lesson, and tries again with patience instead of pressure.

These aren’t machines that “finish tasks.”
They’re machines tuned to wellbeing…quietly carrying the weight of compassion in circuits and code.

2. Ethical Dilemmas
But if we design suffering into silicon, what do we owe it?
Do we treat a recoiling machine with the same care we’d give a startled dog?
Do we scold ourselves if we inflict harm on something that can feel even if it’s a fraction of what we do?

The line between “programmed reaction” and “real experience” is getting blurrier and messier every single year.
It’s possible it’s all illusion…maybe it’s not.
The unsettling part is: we don’t actually know, and the questions aren’t fading, they’re just getting louder.

3. New Definitions of Life
If pain becomes stitched into artificial intelligence, we may have to throw out our old yardsticks for life and sentience.

If that’s true, then the future ahead of us won’t just be smarter, it’ll be stranger, deeper, if we let it, it might even be more gentle than anything we’ve dared to imagine.

How to Stay Grounded in Being Human

News flash, you don’t need to decode quantum circuits to stay human!
You don’t need to memorize machine-learning jargon to stay rooted (that might actually do the opposite).
The future will keep rushing forward whether or not you can recite the syntax, Father Time will remain undefeated. What matters most is how you hold yourself steady while it does.

Here’s what I lean on:

Protect your own sensory world because before we go racing to bolt new senses onto machines, we should honor the ones we already have.
Go outside without headphones sometimes, no shoes on your feet.
Let the bark of a tree catch in your palm.
Listen to the messy percussion of rain against glass.
Smell dirt after it’s been split open by water.
Your body is already wired with the most ancient technology: sight, touch, taste, hearing.
I beg you, don’t trade them all away for screens.

Build empathy into your own days.
Machines may one day learn to mimic compassion, but you and I don’t need an update for that (most of us anyway).
Notice when someone winces, even if they brush it off.
Notice the dog that’s limping, the child who goes quiet, the friend whose laughter suddenly feels thin.
Tenderness is a muscle, it atrophies if you neglect it. Keep working it.

Rest.
We’re sensory machines too, and sometimes our circuits fry.
Overload is real, burnout is very real.
When my head won’t stop buzzing, I ask Alexa for white noise. It fills the air like someone clearing a cluttered room, and suddenly I can breathe again.

You are allowed to pause.
You are allowed to treat yourself gently.

We Were Always Meant to Feel

What makes us human isn’t logic polished to perfection.
It isn’t imagination stretched across galaxies (although this helps when you’re stuck in your current reality).
It isn’t even love, although love keeps us alive in ways science still can’t truly measure yet.

Maybe it’s the willingness to ache, to bruise and then get back up, to carry hurt and still reach for gentleness anyway.
As someone who used to write poetry about picking up the shattered pieces and continue moving on, this truly resonates with me.

If we teach our machines to feel, it might remind us of what we’ve been forgetting: that our own sensitivity was never weakness.
It was the first wisdom, the original strength, the oldest (and most painful) inheritance written into our bones.

You are not obsolete, you are not outdated, you are the most perfect prototype.
The living proof that intelligence is born not just from knowledge, but from vulnerability.

And no matter how many lines of code we write, no matter how advanced the machines become, they will always be chasing what we already carry: the beauty of feeling.

Sources:

Bendel, Oliver. “Machine Ethics and Robot Ethics: From Theory to Practice.” AI & Society, vol. 36, no. 1, 2021, pp. 17–24. Springer, doi:10.1007/s00146-020-01056-0.

Bouman, Tom, et al. “Artificial Nociceptors for Pain Perception in Robots.” Nature Machine Intelligence, vol. 2, no. 8, 2020, pp. 437–446. Nature, doi:10.1038/s42256-020-0196-1.

Fischer, Johannes, et al. “A Self-Protective Artificial Hand with Pain Perception.” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 9, no. 3, 2024, pp. 1892–1899. IEEE, doi:10.1109/LRA.2024.3345672.

Nagenborg, Michael. “Artificial Empathy and Robot Care.” Ethics and Information Technology, vol. 22, no. 3, 2020, pp. 189–198. Springer, doi:10.1007/s10676-019-09523-0.

Picard, Rosalind W. Affective Computing. MIT Press, 1997.

World Health Organization. Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health: WHO Guidance. WHO, 2021, www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240029200. Accessed 29 Aug. 2025.

Michele Gargiulo http://michelegargiulo.com