A.I. as it exists currently will never be capable of truly mimicking the human mind, including the many emotions we feel on a day to day basis. Right now, A.I. is mostly just advanced algorithms that rip things from whatever its source material is or takes what it can from the wealth of all human knowledge that is the internet. Because of that, A.I. cannot grasp the human experience. It can pretend to, by pulling a post from any social media website and saying āwell, when this situation happens, most people tend to feel Xā but thatās not real emotion, is it?
However, technology is constantly evolving. If at some point in the future, some tech bro can figure out how to perfectly and consistently create digital neural networks that mimic the human brain, then yes, that A.I. might be able to feel emotion, though it will never be āhuman emotionā as A.I.s will never be truly and completely human in the sense you and I are.
So I guess it depends on what your definition of āemotionā is. If you mean emotion as in āthe full sensory and mental experience that emotions spawn in humans,ā then the answer is no, an A.I. will never fully experience the complexities of human emotion. If you mean emotion as in āWhen X stimuli occurs, I react X way,ā then yes, an A.I would be capable of that.
Overall, A.I. bad, humans good.
For some media to peruse, Iād recommend Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick (if you havenāt read it already) as well as anything related to Bladerunner (which is based on the aforementioned book).
This is a great question, thanks for asking it!