Abstract

There are several ways to look at technical objects and at human-machine interaction with regard to emotions and emotional bonding. Some research deals with machines’ ability to detect emotions in humans, some with a technical object’s options to signal emotions in a way understandable to living beings, some with how to alter human emotions with machinic help, some with the pragmatics or ethics of such endeavours. Philosophers, psychologists, and producers of machines may try to argue for or against the usefulness of technical objects ‘becoming emotional’ (i.e., to process signs of a living being’s emotions or produce signals of emotion understandable to living agents) and explore hypothetically and empirically the consequences of machinic emotion simulation. Social psychologists may study emotional attachment to or acceptancy of machines, designers may try to find ways to build technical objects according to the desired emotional impact on a human. All throughout this, discussions about human-machine relations often concentrate on positive emotions linked to the possibility of friendship, companionship, or human acceptance of machines. Where anger, hate, disappointment, indifference, or curiosity as a source of generally hostile or corrective behaviour towards technical systems are of concern this is often in a context of ‘robot abuse’ (Brscić et al. 2015), robot rights (Gunkel 2018), or in contexts in which authors argue that machines are morally considerable entities either in themselves (Ryland 2021), or, from a point of view of virtue ethics, because of the impact a human beings’ behaviour towards inanimate objects has on the human beings’ character (Coeckelbergh 2021, also cp. Ess in this volume). To add another perspective with regard to the question of how human beings relate to inanimate objects, in this contribution we will specifically analyse the merit of expressing frustration-related emotions towards technical systems in terms of aiming at the goal of a ‘good life’. To this end, we sketch how frustration expression is involved in other interactions (human-human, human-world), we theoretically grasp the frustration-related concepts of ‘trust’, cognitive and normative ‘expectation’ and refer to attributed autonomy along the way, analyse the usefulness of frustration-related emotion expression towards technical objects with and without sociosensitive and socioactive functions, and point to some arguments for and against the use of such functions.