Principles of Synthetic Intelligence

Joscha Bach formalizes the PSI theory of cognition, originally developed by Dietrich Dörner, into a computational architecture where emotion and motivation are not add-ons to intelligence but its organizing principle. Behavior emerges from homeostatic needs — for food, certainty, competence, belonging — that generate goals, direct perception, and color every decision with something like affect, long before explicit reasoning begins.

The book matters for AI because it takes seriously what most architectures treat as noise: that a mind might need something to want before it can be said to think. Building drives and affect in from the start, Bach argues, is less about making machines humanlike than about grounding intelligence in something it cares about.