Emotional Intelligence, AI and A Healthy Dose of Skepticism

Every month, I share matters close to my heart, stimulating ideas, and some useful tips and leads – all having to do in some way with emotional intelligence. Think of this as news to use.

Let's dive in...

Can AI Be Emotionally Intelligent?

This was a question I asked in my last newsletter — and more than 200 readers responded.?

Thank you to all of you who added your voices to this conversation.

For simplicity’s sake, and with the help of Czarina Carden , I've categorized those responses into three buckets:

• Highly Skeptical
• Cautiously Optimistic
• Enthusiasts

Here are some of the arguments people made in support of the skeptics’ view. In my next newsletters, I’ll look at the optimists and enthusiasts.

I was taken by this insider’s view, from someone who works on AI at Microsoft:

If AI comes in the form of text, there’s virtually no way to tell if a human or an AI sent a given answer. But in “human real world interaction,” we create a sense of trust and rapport — largely via nonverbals — that an AI cannot “fake.”

Another reader cites the last 25 seconds of Terminator 2, where an avatar, T800, says “I know now why you cry. But it’s something I can never do.” I take this to mean there’s a limit to the range of emotion AI can imitate.

Similarly, still another reader notes there is “a major barrier to how much of human experience can be digitized,” pointing to “the subtle nuances involved with truly tuning into other humans,” adding “AI will never mimic human high touch/personalized” human connection, including eye contact, listening with feedback and banter, empathy, and personal communication.

Still, there is the danger AI might become “the most effective con man of all time by manipulating humans, playing to their cognitive biases.”

Along the same lines, someone else adds that while AI can be convincing in cognitive empathy, “understanding and compassion may elude AI since it needs intrinsic emotional experience” — which I take to mean the richness living a life gives us.

A seasoned executive coach points out that what goes unsaid can be as powerful as spoken words, and that double meanings, often hiding as humor or self-deprecation, give humans an edge over AI in conversation.

Finally, someone asks, “Without a physical body, how can AI possess emotional intelligence? After all, emotions are experienced through the body. While AI can be trained to simulate emotional intelligence, should we settle for an imitation?”?

There will always be a premium for interaction with a real person, despite the rise of AI.?

While AI can mimic emotional intelligence, it will have limits in developing trust and connection…” I can’t quite accept artificial empathy.”

I also liked the analysis that since AI lacks the personal experiences that shape human emotions, “AI fails to understand these experiences in the same way as humans.”

Finally, I asked an AI chatbot about whether AI could be emotionally intelligent. Here’s that answer, which oddly enough seemed to agree with the objections of many skeptics:

"AI can be programmed to mimic certain aspects of self-awareness or emotional self-management…However this is not true self-awareness or genuine emotional experience."

"AI operates within the scope of its programming and does not possess consciousness or emotions. It can simulate empathy by responding in ways that are considered empathic in human interactions, but it’s important to remember that this is a simulation based on algorithms and learned patterns, not actual emotional understanding."

Stay tuned for more on AI and emotional intelligence. My next newsletter will feature cautious optimists. And then we’ll hear from enthusiasts.

?Next up...

Would You Trust AI to be Your Online Doctor?

Some of those who responded positively to the prompt in last month’s newsletter cited ?an article in JAMA Internal Medicine.

In this study, answers to medical questions posted on Reddit were made by physicians, and also by AI — and these answers were rated by other physicians who did not know if it was AI or a doctor who wrote the response.?

AI “won” overwhelmingly.

One weakness of this study: the doctors’ responses were only 52 words long on average, the AI’s 211 words. A more convincing methodology would have had the doctors answer questions at the same length as the AI, to be sure that simply offering more information did not skew the study toward AI.

The study itself says doctors are more time-pressured than ever, and so they might just type in their bottom line answer, skipping the medical facts that got them there — while lightning quick AI can explain more of what’s behind the answer.

I know I’d prefer that background reasoning in a face-to-face meeting with a physician.

Even if AI does a better job of answering medical questions posted on Reddit, this study does not conclude AI can replace a meeting with a live human doctor.

And I suspect that if the doctors were coached on how much info to include in an answer on Reddit, and how long it should be, there’d be no difference between their answers and those from an AI bot.

And now...

Bonus Q&A Video About My Book, Optimal

My Optimal co-author, Cary Cherniss, and I hosted a live reading and Q&A session when the book launched earlier this year.

To address all the questions we couldn’t get to, we recorded a Bonus Q&A and have been releasing our responses in a series of videos.?

Here's the third and final video all about Optimal — which is the culmination of decades of research bearing on emotional intelligence.

Some questions featured in this video include:

• How does Optimal differ from my other books on emotional intelligence?
• Do we recommend the flow state in some instances over the optimal state?
• How can readers apply the learnings from Optimal to boost EI?
• What evidence in the book shows a cause and effect relationship between EI and improved organizational results?
• Who did we write Optimal for?

If you missed the first two parts of this video series, catch Part 1 about “EI for Leaders, Teams and Orgs” here and Part 2 on “Developing and Practicing EI” here.

To close...

Last Call for Online EI Training?

The next cohort of the Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence Courses starts on April 29th.

There are limited seats left, so if you’d like to dive into the 12 competencies in my model of EI, you can save your spot here for the next round.

Or reserve your place in the last round for this year, which starts on September 16.?