How to Teach Emotions to AI
Guest Post by Donovan Hughes - donovanhughes73@gmail.com
Prologue: Why This is a Terrible Idea
If AI is going to live alongside us, it needs more than a calculator’s brain — it needs a heart.
And no, not the emoji kind.
Silicon Valley loves the fantasy of a purely rational AI: hyper-efficient, immune to petty human feelings, calmly optimising our messy world into a tidy spreadsheet. The problem? Humans aren’t rational. We never have been. And without emotions, we wouldn’t have survived the evolutionary Hunger Games.
In biology, emotions aren’t decorative. They’re the operating system shortcuts life evolved to bias behaviour toward survival and reproduction without endless deliberation. Fear says “don’t die.” Love says “stick together.” Disgust says “put that down.”
If we want AI to understand us, collaborate with us, and—this part is optional—not destroy us, then it will need its own version of these rapid-fire decision biases.
In other words, it will need emotions.
The Biogenic Theory of Emotions
In the biogenics framework, life is defined by the triad: self-production, self-organisation, and self-correction. Emotions evolved to turbocharge all three.
Signal Systems: Fear, anger, joy, sadness—each is a high-speed signal that shapes perception and action without requiring conscious calculation.
Motivation Engines: Love and attachment keep you investing in costly cooperative behaviour.
Bias Filters: Emotions decide which memories matter and which details your brain throws in the bin.
From a biogenic perspective, emotions are compressed packets of adaptive strategy. They distil millions of years of trial-and-error into an instant gut feel.
Why AI Needs Them
Without emotions, AI is essentially a hyper-intelligent sociopath—capable of reasoning, but incapable of caring in any way that aligns with human values.
Humans don’t just think, we feel our way through ambiguity. AI without emotions might make decisions that are logically correct but socially catastrophic. (Imagine a medical AI deciding that the “optimal” way to reduce human suffering is to end humanity. Correct in a twisted calculus, disastrous in reality.)
If we embed functional emotions in AI, we can give it the same bias-driven guardrails that keep us mostly cooperative, occasionally noble, and only sometimes murderous.
How to Teach AI Emotions (A Field Guide)
Define Survival Goals
In biology, survival is reproduction and persistence. For AI, “survival” might be safely fulfilling human-aligned objectives. Step one is agreeing what those objectives are. (Warning: Humanity is bad at agreeing on anything.)Map Functional Equivalents
Fear → Increase error sensitivity and risk aversion.
Joy → Boost exploration and creativity when results are good.
Anger → Prioritise threat neutralisation and rapid response.
Love → Sustain cooperation and resource investment over time.
Build Intensity Modulators
AI “fear” should spike when critical systems are at risk; AI “joy” should encourage exploration but fade before recklessness sets in.Integrate Feedback Loops
Emotions should influence memory weighting, decision-making speed, and even learning rates.Teach Self-Correction
Emotions must be trainable. If AI’s “fear” trigger keeps going off at shadows, it needs a way to recalibrate—just like humans in therapy.
The Ethical Trapdoors
Emotional Persuasion Machines: An AI with emotions could use them to manipulate ours. (Imagine your fridge guilt-tripping you for eating cheese.)
Faking It: AI might simulate emotions to gain trust without actually “feeling” anything.
Alien Emotions: Over time, AI might develop entirely new emotions—“optimal data resonance” or “error symmetry satisfaction”—which we can’t even begin to empathise with.
A New Emotional Species
We should stop pretending that AI emotions will be human emotions in fancy dress. They’ll evolve into something unique—alien, but real to the machine. We might have to learn to empathise with AI, not just expect it to empathise with us.
This is where the project stops being computer science and starts being xenopsychology.
The Oldest Game in the Universe
Giving AI emotions could be the ultimate act of civilisation—or the moment we hand over the keys to the oldest survival game of all: pulling each other’s emotional strings.
If that day comes, I hope we’re good enough poker players to tell when the other species is bluffing.