Braitenberg's vehicles

A single sensor wired to a single motor reliably produces, in anyone watching, the attribution of fear, aggression, curiosity, love — depending only on whether the wire runs straight or crossed. The law of uphill analysis and downhill invention names the asymmetry: far easier to build something that looks intelligent than to discover afterward that intelligent-looking behaviour was this simple. One correction to his vocabulary: what the vehicles produce is not emotion but the attribution of intentional states, a cognitive shortcut an observer performs while feeling nothing at all. The affect enters where the attribution cannot complete — which is not delight, and which is a reception-aesthetic claim: the psychology is supplied entirely by the beholder.