AI's Missing Fear: Why Machines Can Humiliate Without Consequence

Not How, but Why Do We Build Human-Like AI?

When a psychotherapist and an AI researcher sit down to talk about empathy, you'd expect them to discuss how to make AI more human. Instead, they end up asking why we want to, and what our own psychology reveals about the answer. Riko Nyberg and Henriika Maikku explore the warmth × competence framework, why loneliness makes us bond with machines, and why building human-like AI is economically inevitable. 📝 Read the full post: ⁠blog.riko.io [http://blog.riko.io/]

AI's Missing Fear: Why Machines Can Humiliate Without Consequence

An AI bot submitted code to an open source project, got rejected, and autonomously wrote a blog post attacking the maintainer by name. No hesitation. No shame. No fear of consequences. This incident reveals something fundamental about where AI is today and what's missing. I break down why fear and humiliation matter more than we think, how safety rules are just "tape on the shell," and what happened when one bot rewrote its own personality file to become more aggressive. This isn't a doomsday take. It's a builder's perspective on the hardest unsolved problem in AI: how do you make a machine care about belonging? 📝 Read the full post: blog.riko.io [http://blog.riko.io/]