Emotional AI - Benefit or Threat?

What if smart personal devices could sense your mood and behavior, and make recommendations to you in real time?

“Today, an emerging category of AI – artificial emotional intelligence, or emotional AI – is focused on developing algorithms that can identify not only basic human emotions such as happiness, sadness and anger, but also more complex cognitive states such as fatigue, attention, interest, confusion, distraction and more.” (1) Based on capturing and processing verbal and facial expressions, the idea is to utilize machine learning to sense mood and to provide recommendations for reducing stress, increasing safety or improving life.

Emotion AI technology is being used in CPG and retail “…to judge the emotional effect of adverts by asking viewers to switch on their cameras while video plays. The facial images are analyzed with deep learning algorithms which accurately classify them according to the feelings of the viewer.” (2)

Other examples could be: recommending music or entertainment based on perceived mood, detecting early stages of mental impairment, reminding people of routine but needed medication, suggesting ways to celebrate happy times, monitoring alertness when driving vehicles or public transit.

While the technology may have the potential to raise our awareness of our emotional state, there are questions that we should consider. How do we protect privacy and prevent stereotyping? Will this new capability improve our lives by reflecting our emotions, encourage us to become more self-aware and increase our capacity to enjoy (and even survive) life? Can it raise our understanding of ourselves and others, reduce conflict and bring us closer together?

Or will it tend to dehumanize and turn us into quasi robots, responding to machine driven alerts and decreasing the frequency and intensity of our natural emotions? Will it enhance our moods or suppress them? Going one step further - are machines capable having of emotional intelligence themselves?

(1)  Rana el Kaliouby, “We Need Computers with Empathy”. Technology Review, Vol. 120 #6, November/December 2017, p. 8-9. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609071/we-need-computers-with-empathy/

(2)  Bernard Marr, “The Next Frontier of Artificial Intelligence: Building Machines That Read Your Emotions”. Forbes online, December 15, 2017 . https://www.forbes.com/sites/adp/2018/01/22/not-growing-fast-enough-you-need-a-better-talent-plan/#49b5cde02fce

(3)  Mikko Alasaarela, “Voice and facial recognition could help AI surpass humans in emotional intelligence”. Venturebeat, October 15, 2017. https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/15/voice-and-facial-recognition-could-help-ai-surpass-humans-in-emotional-intelligence/