Intelligence covers a broad range of cognition, including making plans, reasoning, forming analogies, teaching,
Neural net AIs do one tiny portion of this (classification) very well, but they do not do everything that we might call “intelligence.”
Emotion is what we call our capacity for snap judgement. With all emotion and no reason, we can act instantly and decisively, which is exactly how neural nets perform.
An emotion is a predisposition or bias. It cuts down on time spent thinking and helps us decide how to act. With every emotion (angry, sad, love, fear), we are inclined to be more likely to act a certain way, driven by that emotion and our capacity to act.
We trust our emotions because they lead us to act appropriately. We run away when we’re afraid, we share food with those we love, etc. We do this quickly and without hesitation.
The AIs we build, using neural net algorithms, are in fact Artificial Emotion engines.