Imagine I am a sentient, emotional robot. I can learn anything you teach me, but I can't imagine what you know, which is a lot more than me, about social cues.

So we play a game where you teach me about feelings: I imitate you, and learn to associate a feeling with a tone of voice, an expression and/or body language, and then later, I can understand that you have that feeling when you make that expression, use that tone of voice, or hold your body that way. And when I have that feeling, I do the things I learned from you, so you can understand my emotional state. The more you teach me, the more I can pick up. You may start to think I'm "just like you."

But the subtle, complex cues are hard. If you later show me a set of behaviors I've never seen before, or that are too hard for me to follow, I won't know what's going on.

Because you think of me as human now, you will think I'm ignoring you, or being mean. It can hurt your feelings a lot. Eventually you may show an expression obvious enough that I understand, but I won't know why you're feeling angry, upset or sad. I'll only know if you tell me. I may have to learn a subroutine called, "I can't read your mind, what are you upset about?"