PERSON
Kingson Man
Neuroscientist at USC's Brain and Creativity Institute whose 2019 paper with Damasio on feeling machines set the technical agenda for what it would take to narrow the evaluative gap between minds and machines.
Kingson Man is a neuroscientist working at the University of Southern California's Brain and Creativity Institute under Antonio Damasio. His 2019 co-authored paper in Nature Machine Intelligence, "Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design of feeling machines," applied Damasio's framework to artificial intelligence with technical specificity, arguing that genuine machine feeling would require vulnerability — physical substrates whose continued integrity is computationally significant. The paper emerged from an observation Man made walking his dog: a modest-compute biological creature navigated the world with adaptive intelligence a dedicated robot could not match, and the difference was that the dog could be hurt.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Man's academic training bridges computational neuroscience and affective science, positioning him well for work on the interface between AI and the biology of feeling. His collaboration with Damasio began in the 2010s and has focused specifically on how Damasio's framework — developed through four decades of clinical work — might be translated into