Mixed Emotions: Technology and Artificial Intelligence

To celebrate Father’s Day, I spent this past weekend with my kids at Woodloch – a kid-friendly lake resort in Pennsylvania. It was a great for a quick get-away, and I highly recommend it. During our stay I came across a poster on the wall which contained a quote from ESPN commentator and college basketball coach, Jim Valvano.

“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.”

I was impacted by this quote because conceptually it’s so simple, yet truly profound. As humans we are so consumed with our day to day, that experiencing just two of these emotions in a 24 hour period is likely to prove itself difficult. I want to laugh, think and be moved to tears every day, but how? It got me thinking a lot about the advancements of AI, but also how limited technology still is. While technology has enabled us in so many ways, can AI really detect human emotion, and furthermore, help us experience it fully? 

What I’m Reading Around the Web

When our Devices can Read our Emotions 
(12 min. read)
MIT Technology Review 
“In the emerging field of “emotion-tracking AI,” companies are studying the facial expressions captured by our devices’ cameras to allow software of all kinds become more responsive to our moods and cognitive states.”

Amazon is Working on a Device that can Read Human Emotions 
(3 min. read)
Bloomberg
“Designed to work with a smartphone app, the device has microphones paired with software that can discern the wearer’s emotional state from the sound of his or her voice, according to the documents and a person familiar with the program. Eventually the technology could be able to advise the wearer how to interact more effectively with others, the documents show.”

How Facial Recognition will Change Driving
(2 min. read)
Fortune
“Advances in facial recognition technology mean machines can not only recognize different people, but also how they are feeling. This means the next generation of automobiles may contain features that scan drivers’ faces for fatigue or other signs of impairment.”

How Emotion-Tracking AI will Change Computing as we Know It
(11 min. read)
Digital Trends
“Welcome to the world of affective computing, a heady blend of psychology and computer science. Based on the idea that something as ephemera l as emotion can be captured and quantified as its own data point, it seeks to create technology that’s able to accurately mine our emotions.”