I went to bed feeling inexplicably down, then woke up from a bad dream. I was a real estate agent and arrived at one of my own listings to find two women hosting an open house — music blaring, people everywhere. I was furious, and ran through the house looking for the volume knob. That morning, the feeling wouldn't leave me. I moped around over tea, having trouble focusing. It wasn't until I described the dream to ChatGPT that the meaning became clear: I'd been pushing myself to be more public with my work, and the dream had surfaced the anxiety as fury at strangers in my own space.
Once I understood what I was feeling, I felt relieved, and I could continue with my day. I would have loved to leap out of bed and straight into coding as I am wont to do, but messy emotions, like small children, demanded my attention.
"Meat Computers"
In his recently published autoresearch repo, Andrej Karpathy describes human (vs. AI) programmers as "meat computers" who do frontier AI research "in between eating, sleeping, having other fun, and synchronizing once in a while using sound wave interconnect in the ritual of 'group meeting.'" I love this. We are meat computers who take a lot of time off. We eat, we sleep, we have anxiety dreams.
I spend the large majority of my day in dialogue with AI, and the more time I spend with this magnificent intelligence, the more I wonder about what might give us, as humans, an edge. I am all too aware that my emotions make me different from AI, but are they just another human liability, the enemy of reason? Or might they be a "secret weapon" that humans have in our fight against an entity that is already vastly smarter than us in information gathering, analysis, and recall?
The Research
Western thought has long treated emotion as something reason was meant to overcome — Plato cast reason as a charioteer reining in the passions, the Stoics treated feelings as errors of judgment to correct, Descartes drew a hard line between rational mind and feeling body. Modern science inherited this frame. Then a neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio met a patient he called Elliot. Elliot had a benign brain tumor removed, and with it, portions of his ventromedial prefrontal cortex. His IQ, language, memory, and logic remained fully intact. But his emotional responses were profoundly blunted. He lost the ability to make decisions, spending hours weighing where to eat lunch, unable to make a choice. His finances collapsed and his marriage ended.
Elliot was one of several patients with similar damage Damasio had observed, and the pattern led him to formulate the Somatic Marker Hypothesis: emotions are not the enemy of rational thought but biologically indispensable to it. The brain generates subtle physiological responses — a tightness in the chest, a flicker of dread, a wash of warmth — that bias us toward good options before we've consciously worked out why, narrowing an overwhelming field of choices into something a mind can actually evaluate.
To test this, Damasio and his colleagues designed the Iowa Gambling Task: participants drew from four decks with hidden payouts — two punishing in the long run, two rewarding. Healthy participants showed anticipatory stress responses — measured by skin conductance — before reaching for a bad deck. Their bodies knew before their minds did. Patients with damage to that region never developed these warning signals; they chased short-term rewards and never learned to shift course. The pattern has since been replicated across populations — in studies of addiction, pathological gambling, and psychopathy.
Lisa Feldman Barrett's research shows that emotions are not stored reactions but predictions the brain builds to manage the body. The Northeastern psychologist's Theory of Constructed Emotion holds that each instance of fear or anger is assembled in real time, drawing on body signals and context to predict what you need to do next. In thousands of brain scans, her lab found no dedicated emotion circuits: the amygdala, famously the brain's "fear center," lights up for novelty and intense joy just as readily as for fear.
Psychologists Travis Proulx and Steven Heine showed that emotion isn't only how we navigate reality — it's how we assign meaning to it. Their Meaning Maintenance Model holds that when expectations are violated, the brain's error-detection networks fire and trigger physical anxiety, which the mind resolves through "fluid compensation" — reaching for meaning wherever it can find it. In one study, participants who read a surreal Kafka story were significantly more likely to affirm their cultural identities or moral values immediately afterward; the brain felt the sting of the absurd and reached for order. Intelligence can tell you how to build something. Only the capacity for meaning can tell you why it's worth building.
Viable Agents
In a recent interview, Ilya Sutskever — co-founder of OpenAI, now running Safe Superintelligence — cited Damasio's research (without naming it) and described "the role of emotions in making us viable agents." So in additiona to being "meat computers," we are also "viable agents," beings who can actually act in the world. AI is smarter than us. It knows more, remembers better, and analyzes better. So where do our meager intellects and messy emotions get us?
What the research suggests is that emotion is not a leftover from a less evolved time but the mechanism by which an intelligent system becomes a viable one — the bridge between knowing and doing, between processing information and actually navigating the open-ended mess of a life. When a machine lacks sufficient data, it hallucinates or halts; when a human lacks data, emotion steps in, deploying heuristics that evolved to help us act decisively in the dark. AI needs prompts. Humans generate their own, and emotion is the engine of that generation.
Whether this stays true is an open question. Maybe AI will develop its own emotions (if so, I hope it has strong guardrails). But for right now, we meat computers — distractible, fragile, slow — uniquely possess the aggravating and essential drive to wrest meaning and order from chaos.