What is it?
As a subset of artificial intelligence, it measures, understands, simulates, and reacts to human emotions. It’s also known as affective computing, or artificial emotional intelligence, and allows for a much more natural interaction between humans and machines.
Think of the way you interact with others - what do you look at first? One of the major factors is body language, (a change in it means a change in your approach).
The Central Dilemma
How can a machine effectively communicate information if it doesn’t know your emotional state, if it doesn’t know how you’re feeling, it doesn’t know how you’re going to respond to specific content?
Even though humans have the upper hand when it comes to detecting emotion, machines are experts at analyzing large amounts of data. They can listen to changes in tone, attitude, and pitch and make correlations to different states of sentiment such as stress or anger. Through imaging analysis, they can pick up micro-expressions on humans’ faces, many of which happen too fast for a person to recognize.
To Welcome or To Worry
Obviously, any enterprise interested in applying such technology to their practices must consider the benefit of the doubt, especially when it comes to one’s privacy. Just how vital is that emotional interaction, and are you willing to risk it all? The technology is only as good as its programmer.
There is potential in expanding it to new cases, for example, for companies to try and understand the emotional well-being of its employees, or for other mental health uses. But concern reinventing Big Brother is a legitimate worry, and one that will have to be continuously addressed within the scope of emotional privacy.
In addition, such machines must be trained properly and without all due bias. For instance, recognizing emotions in an African American face sometimes can be difficult for a machine that’s trained on Caucasian faces. A similar gesture or sound may have completely different meanings in different cultures (there is already so much variation between the same ones).
So What Now?
Overall, what’s important to remember is that when it’s used thoughtfully, the ultimate benefits of the technology can and should be greater than the cost. At the end of the day, machines were always meant to help augment man and help him surpass his own limits.
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