Affect, artificial intelligence, and internal space

Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) affectless? This essay explores a small fragment from the early history of AI when questions about affect became pressing. It focuses on biographical and intellectual data about Walter Pitts, one of the important early practitioners of cybernetics. The essay addresses two interlocking difficulties in early AI: (1) it points to the harm caused to a science that establishes itself by inhibiting the affective capacities of the mind; and (2) it ponders the melancholic effects of a research milieu that, contemptuously, rejects knowledge of internal psychological space.