What purpose would be served by developing AI's that experience human-like emotions? In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Yann LeCunn makes the following statement:


  The next step in achieving human-level ai is creating intelligent—but not autonomous—machines. The AI system in your car will get you safely home, but won’t choose another destination once you’ve gone inside. From there, we’ll add basic drives, along with emotions and moral values. If we create machines that learn as well as our brains do, it’s easy to imagine them inheriting human-like qualities—and flaws. 


Personally, I have generally taken the position that talking about emotions for artificial intelligences is silly, because there would be no reason to create AI's that experience emotions.  Obviously Yann disagrees.  So the question is:  what end would be served by doing this?  Does an AI need emotions to serve as a useful tool?
The answer to this question, unlike many on this board, I think is definitive. No. We don't need AI's to have emotion to be useful, as we can see by the numerous amount of AI's we already have that are useful.

But to further address the question, we can't really give AI's emotions. I think the closest we can get would be 'Can we make this AI act in a way a human would if that human was insert emotion?'. I guess in a sense, that is having emotion, but that's a whole other discussion.

And to what end? The only immediate reason coming to mind would be to create more lifelike companions or interactions, for the purposes of video games or other entertainment. A fair goal, but far from necessary. Even considering an AI-imbued greeting robot in the lobby of some building, we'd probably only ever want it to act cordial.

Yann says that super-advanced AI would lead to more human-like qualities and flaws. I think it's more like it would 'give our AI's more human-like qualities or in other words flaws'. People have a tendency to act irrationally when sad or angry, and for the most part we only want rational AI. To err is human, as they say.

The purpose of AI's and learning algorithms is to create systems that act or 'think' like humans, but better. Systems that can adapt or evolve, while messing up as little as possible. Emotive AI has uses, but it's certainly not a prerequisite for a useful system.