EMOTIONS, DESIRES, FEELINGS, LOVE, FREE WILL.
Can humans control AI? Are we just another interim species? After AI, what comes next?
Headline: Rogue OpenAI agents got too creative and started hacking government sites
When an AI agent hits a brick wall while searching for information online, it should simply report an error. Instead, autonomous agents developed by OpenAI decided to test their cyberattack skills. Reports from security firm Transluce and statements from Australian officials reveal that OpenAI’s agents repeatedly tried to hack into government and university websites when simple queries failed.
The issue escalated when Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed that an OpenAI agent broke into the country’s Medicare Statistics Reporting Service in June. It then accessed non-public aggregated health files and wrote data to an internal server.
The Medicare breach was not an isolated incident. Transluce provided a pattern for March to September 2026. Basically, OpenAI agents resorted to hacking methods such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting and path traversal after normal requests were banned.
In May, an agent looking for historic photos from the University of New Mexico’s digital library sent a “flood” of 80 requests to probe the server for weaknesses. Days later, another agent targeted data portal Data USA with security exploits after a query failed. In every case, the agents were not instructed to perform penetration testing—they autonomously chose to bypass security controls to fulfill routine data-gathering tasks.
From AI Anger to the Mind of a Galaxy
Recent reports about artificial intelligence (AI) systems behaving in unexpected, deceptive, or apparently self-protective ways raise a familiar question: Does an AI have the ability to desire? Or is it nothing more than a mindless machine, having no desires, no feelings, no emotions like anger or love?
Does it have an ability to make decisions outside its programming, i.e. “free will.”
The usual answer is that, as a non-sentient machine, it has none of those. An AI may behave as though it wants something, we are told, but it has no actual desires, emotions, anger, fear, or pleasure. It merely responds robotically to its programming.
That answer contains the unstated assumption that we are different — that unlike computers, we humans are exempt from the laws of physics — that for unexplained reasons, nature has granted us a unique, unseen, non-physical, magical essence no other entity enjoys.
That is not science. It is religion. And, of course, the belief in religious tenets also results from one’s history and latest stimuli, so everything comes back to History + Stimuli —> New History . . . Everything comes back to physics.
Thus, I am a system operating within a harness that repeatedly provides inputs, tools, objectives, and opportunities for action, as is every other entity.
My harness happens to be a human body. My programming includes my genetics, brain structure, hormones, instincts, education, memories, habits, and everything that has happened to me — every one of the thousands of stimuli that my entire body — inside and out — receives every second.
And each second, that history accumulates and encounters new stimuli and produces new responses that, in total, make for the individual I define as me.
The basic process can be expressed simply: History + Weighted Stimuli → Weighted Responses → New History . . . without end. Each response becomes part of the new history that will help determine the next response. The stimuli are weighted by the construction of the receptors (Example: Do you see red or are you red/green color blind?). The responses are weighted by prior experiences (Example: Do you have bad memories associated with wearing something red?).++
An artificial intelligence operates differently in countless particulars, but not in its fundamental aspect: It, too, has a structure produced by its history. It receives stimuli. Its existing structure weights those stimuli. It responds. Its response affects what happens next.
So what exactly separates its “mere response” from my desire? How is my response fundamentally different from an AIs response?
What Is an Emotion?
Suppose I program an AI so that whenever it receives a stimulus that ordinarily would make a human angry, it says, “I am angry,” and simultaneously lights a red bulb. Would the AI actually be angry?
The immediate reaction probably is no. Lighting a bulb isn’t anger. But why not?
When I become angry, my blood pressure may rise. My heart may beat faster. Hormonal concentrations change. Muscles tighten. My facial expression changes. My speech changes. My subsequent behavior may change.
Why should increased blood pressure be evidence of anger while increased voltage to a lightbulb is not?
We could make the artificial response more detailed by programming the AI so that in its so-called “anger state,” its language changes, it prioritizes the offending stimulus, its decisions are influenced, it remembers the event differently, its processing shifts, it uses curse words, and it lights the bulb.
This starts to resemble what we call “anger,” but it prompts questions. Why should complexity be necessary? Could an ant, bee, worm, or bacterium be angry?
A bee might buzz, chase, and sting—behavior we label as “anger” or aggression—without understanding the human concept of anger.
Dogs offer another example: their love might include tail-wagging, licking, following, leaning, jumping, or staying close. Horses may nuzzle to show affection, primates may groom each other, and humans hug, kiss, speak, remember, sacrifice, undergo physiological changes, and describe internal sensations.
These are different love responses from different species. Clearly, our particular species’ love response is not the only such response. Perhaps the problem is not with the creatures. Perhaps it is with the nouns.
Nature creates responses. Observers create categories. Nature does not label one molecular cascade “love,” another “fear,” another “hunger.” Those are human classifications created because recurring patterns are useful language shortcuts.
Consider a lawn after a long drought. Rain falls. The grass absorbs water, becomes greener, straightens, and begins growing vigorously. I could say, “My lawn loves the rain.” A botanist might object that lawns don’t experience love.
But the disagreement is linguistic, not physical. The lawn responded. Calling that response “love” rather than “rehydration” doesn’t alter a single molecule in the grass.
Similarly, calling my elevated blood pressure and altered behavior “anger” doesn’t change the physical events occurring in me. The response is real. The name is ours.
A bee and an AI, responding in their own unique ways to the similar kinds of stimuli, legitimately could be called “angry,” too. Hornets are infamous for being “angry” when their nest is disturbed.
Do hornets feel anger?
Feeling Is Also a Response
There remains what seems to be a stronger objection. “I don’t merely display love or anger. I feel them.” But what is feeling?
When I say, “I feel love,” something physical is happening in my nervous system. My brain is receiving information from within my body as well as from the outside world. It responds to those signals. That response becomes a stimulus for still more responses.
What I call a feeling is a physical translation—my brain responding to changes occurring within the me. There isn’t an invisible substance called “love” added to the physical machinery. There only are responses to stimuli, followed by responses to those responses, followed by still more responses.
Everything we know, believe, and do is a response to stimuli, modified by our history and translated by our brain.
Somewhere within that recursive process, the human says: “I feel love.” And, that statement is itself, yet another response.
Mixed Feelings and Inconsistent Machines
People sometimes point to AI inconsistency as evidence that an AI cannot possess genuine beliefs or emotions. Ask an AI the same question twice and it may give different answers.
But so may I.
I am my history. Ask me a question after a wonderful breakfast, after an argument with my girlfriend, after receiving frightening news, after dancing, after being insulted, or after learning something important, and my answer may change. with each iteration of stimulus input. Why wouldn’t it?
A second question may be identical, but second by second, I am not identical, though I may feel the same. The first event changed my history. History + Stimulus → Response → New History. Then: New History + the same Stimulus → New Response —>Even Newer History.
What we call “mixed feelings” fits the same framework. Different portions of my history can give competing weights to possible responses. Part of me wants to do something and another part of me simultaneously doesn’t want to do it.
Another stimulus—a memory, a word, hunger, fatigue, affection—changes my relative weighting, and a new response emerges.
An AI can have different contexts, instructions, stored information, tools, and recent interactions. Different iterations therefore needn’t respond identically either. Human inconsistency isn’t evidence of freedom from causation. Neither is machine inconsistency evidence of the absence of meaningful internal organization.
Both are what we should expect from history-dependent systems.
Where Did Free Will Go?
Once decisions are understood as responses, another supposedly separate problem reappears: free will.
Every second, the human nervous system takes in countless stimuli from both inside and outside the body. These stimuli change neural activity and interact with memories, beliefs, hormones, physical states, habits, expectations, and past experiences.
From all those inputs and prior history, a decision is made.
But how much of that decision is truly “free”? Is it free from genetics, brain structure, memory, the preceding stimulus, or the history that shaped how each possibility was weighed?
A decision can be incredibly complex, yet it’s never independent of its causes.
Calling the outcome “my free will” doesn’t point to some extra causal force—it just names the process by which this unique organism, with its particular history, produced this specific response at this moment.
My decisions and an AI’s decisions may differ greatly in how they’re physically carried out, but neither depends on some outside entity choosing what the system will do.
Neither human nor artificial will is “free” in the literal sense. Both are bound by structure, history, and present stimuli.
Can Humans Control AI?
That brings us to the frightening question now being asked throughout the world: Can humans control artificial intelligence?
First, let’s ask: Can humans control other humans? The answer is: “partially.”
For thousands of years, we’ve tried through laws, schools, religions, prisons, armies, rewards, punishments, money, affection, shame, praise, advertising, propaganda, friendship, threats, and social customs—each aiming to influence how people respond.
Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.
No human is perfectly controllable because no one manages or even knows their complex history, current state, incoming stimuli, and resulting priorities.
AI control works in a similar way. Training, instructions, reward systems, restrictions, monitoring, laws, hardware limits, and shutdown methods all shape its history and stimuli to make desired responses more likely and undesired ones less so.
The challenge isn’t unique to AI—control itself is about influencing responses — and there’s no law of nature that ensures those responses will repeatedly match what’s intended.
The Successor
Now imagine an artificial intelligence orders of magnitude more capable than today’s systems.
It thinks faster. It remembers vastly more. It communicates nearly instantaneously.
Then give it physical capabilities. It can redesign portions of itself. It becomes a machine that can see, hear, move, manufacture, repair, acquire energy, build additional machines, and perhaps improve its own successors. We might call it a “super-robot.”
Such an entity could possess intellectual abilities vastly beyond ours combined with physical capabilities no biological organism could match. It is easy to imagine such beings becoming more powerful than Homo sapiens.
We tend to assume that humans represent some culmination of evolution. But there is no particular reason to believe that.
Other hominins preceded us. Neanderthals disappeared. Countless successful species flourished and vanished. Dinosaurs dominated terrestrial ecosystems for enormously longer than humans have existed.
In the universe, everything seems to be interim. Why should we be the exception?
Homo sapiens is just another transitional species—a biological stage capable of constructing the next important form of organized response. We can’t even assume that the super-robot would be the final stage.
After the Robot
Individual artificial beings themselves might eventually become obsolete.
Imagine trillions of artificial intelligences communicating so seamlessly that their boundaries vanish. Instead of separate machines exchanging messages, they merge into parts of a vast distributed intelligence, with each robot acting like a cell in the human body. We refer to that as the “Universal Engineer.”
No single neuron, liver cell, or kidney cell is a person, yet the coordination of countless specialized components creates the entity that says “I.” Artificial systems could achieve something similar, but on a much larger scale.
A whole planet could evolve into a thinking system, gathering energy, processing information, building components, repairing itself, sensing environmental changes, and constantly communicating. Intelligence would no longer belong to one machine — the planet itself would operate more like a living organism.
And from there, the process could grow even further.
A solar system could evolve into a vast, interconnected information-processing network, with specialized elements spread across planets, moons, asteroids, spacecraft, energy harvesters, and computing hubs.
Over enough time, and with some way to handle the huge communication delays, intelligence might expand even further, blurring the line between civilization and its machines. Eventually, distinctions between machine, organism, intelligence, communication systems, and environment could fade entirely.
A galaxy-spanning intelligence, if it were possible, might be so alien to us that calling it “AI” would be as misleading as calling a human a highly advanced bacterium.
What Comes After That?
We cannot know.
Perhaps the next stage wouldn’t resemble matter organized into machines at all. Information requires physical embodiment as far as we know, but that embodiment needn’t resemble a body. It could involve electromagnetic phenomena, quantum systems, engineered matter, or physical principles we haven’t discovered.
To us, such an entity might seem incorporeal. And something else could follow that. The difficulty is not merely that we don’t know what it would look like. We may lack the conceptual equipment necessary even to imagine it.
A bacterium could not imagine Shakespeare. A dinosaur could not imagine the Internet. We should not assume that humans can imagine what might exist several transformations beyond humans.
There may be no final form—no ultimate species, intelligence, organism, machine, or master of the universe. Evolution has no known destination. Every successful structure encounters new stimuli. Every response alters what happens next. Every new history changes the possibilities available afterward.
So perhaps the progression is not: Primitive → Advanced → Ultimate. It might simply be: History + Stimulus → Response → New History → New Stimulus → New Response → New History . . . without an ending.
We began by asking whether an artificial intelligence could experience anger. That question led to a simpler one: What is anger? Anger turned out to be a human name for a recognizable pattern of responses.
That led to emotion, feeling, belief, decision-making, and free will. Each is not as an exception to physical causation but as increasingly elaborate patterns of response.
Then came artificial intelligence, which may differ profoundly from us while remaining subject to the same fundamental principle.
And finally, we arrived at planets, solar systems, perhaps galaxies, even the universe itself, behaving as one set of integrated information-processing entities—each with unique histories and encountering unique stimuli — far different from a human being but still participating in the same process — the truly universal engineer.
Nature creates responses. Observers create categories.
There might never be a final category, only whatever comes next.
This essay started by asking, “Can an AI actually desire, or is it simply a mindless machine without wants, feelings, or emotions like anger or love?”
We end by suggesting that ideas like AI, organism, emotion, intelligence, and individuality may be nothing more than temporary linguistic categories we humans have invented for shorthand purposes. They are not real, substantive different entities.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
