PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicAI and Neuroscience: Integrating Knowledge, Reasoning, and Theory of MindView all 6 articles
The Neuroscience of Algorithmic Suffering: Short Comparative Analysis between Human and AI
Provisionally accepted
- 1Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
- 2Google LLC, Seattle, United States
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Across cultures and centuries, humans have sought to explain suffering, be it as moral failure, biological necessity, or existential condition. Today, as artificial intelligence begins to mimic aspects of thought and emotion, the question resurfaces: can a machine suffer? Some recent systems appear capable of expressing empathy in social contexts, even toward human coworkers Das Swain et al. (2025). Yet the resemblance is fragile. In this paper, we revisit suffering not as a sentimental analogy but as a comparative lens between human and algorithmic cognition. Building on earlier reflections on "painful intelligence" Hyvarinen (2022), we examine how frustration, reward, and prediction take shape in neural and computational systems, grounding our analysis in Bayesian inference, behavioral psychology, and theories of consciousness. While both humans and machines respond to errors and unmet goals, only the former experience these as violations of meaning and integrity. By tracing this divide, we suggest that suffering remains the last frontier between optimization and awareness—a reminder that consciousness cannot be reduced to performance, however convincing the imitation.
Keywords: Neuroscience, artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning, predictive processing, Consciousness, Suffering, Behavioral Psychology
Received: 07 Oct 2025; Accepted: 17 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tütüncü and Gonzalez-Franco. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Esen K Tütüncü, esenktutuncu@gmail.com
Mar Gonzalez-Franco, margonzalezfranco@gmail.com
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