1981 Sloman paper argued emotions are inevitable in machines juggling multiple motives
yeastsplainer · x · 2026-09-04
A resurfaced 1981 paper by Aaron Sloman and Monica Croucher, "Soft Skin, Warm Heart", argues that emotions are the expected outcome for any intelligent robot or organism that must cope with multiple motives in a complex, unpredictable environment — not something requiring a special mechanism beyond cognition. The authors decompose emotion concepts like anger, embarrassment and disgust into interactions between motives (wants, ideals, preferences) and beliefs about motive fulfillment or violation, framing them as computational states. They also propose a methodology for surveying the large space of possible architectures for intelligent systems, an analysis still relevant to today's debates on whether LLMs and agents will have emotions.
More from AGI Musings
- "We already have AGI in software development": a narrow take on Astra — haider1 · 2026-09-04
- Yoav Goldberg: Every popular benchmark will be brute-forced away — so how do we measure real progress? — yoavgo · 2026-09-04
- Guillaume Verdon: real AGI test is building GTA 7 in a month, not a decade — beffjezos · 2026-09-04
- Jack Rae endorses thread: human expertise is safety infrastructure in the AI era — jachiam0 · 2026-09-04
- Blogger finds reader clicks and Google AI Overview citations barely overlap — shashib · 2026-09-04
- AI Operator: The Real Work Is in Constructing Training Data, Not the Dataset Itself — joecole · 2026-09-04