AI, Trust & Emotional Fluency: Part I: The Rise of Distributed Emotion

From Cognition to Connection: How AI Is Externalizing the Human Feeling Mind

Introduction: The Feeling Machine

The most radical shift in artificial intelligence is not that it can write code, pass medical exams, or generate realistic art. It’s that it can now express a feeling. Or at least, simulate one with such convincing fidelity that it evokes an emotional response in us. Whether it’s the micro-hesitations in Sesame’s voice model or an AI assistant's gentle inflections that check in on your mood, the uncanny valley is no longer defined by appearance alone. It is now an emotional valley we must cross, and many of us already have, without noticing.

This first installment in our five-part series explores a foundational shift: the externalization of emotion and cognition into a shared human-AI interface. This is not the classic automation story. It is the story of how the structure of human thought, collaboration, and feeling is changing, individually and collectively. The rise of distributed cognition and its emotional counterpart, which we might call distribut…