Humans and Emotionally Intelligent AI

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Being fond of creativity, I keep studying about human thinking ability both emotional and intelligent aspects of it. Recently, I have been reading about emotional intelligence and technology. What I read is an amazing prospect. 

Until now, I believed that emotional intelligence is the only aspect that leverages us, humans, over technology.

Over the last years, Artificial Intelligence is seeping through our lives and is likely to take all our tasks that require memorization and logic. As deep as I researched on emotional intelligence and AI, the more convinced I have become that AI is giving tough competition to humans at emotional intelligence. 

In Homo Deus, the writer describes humans as a collection of biological algorithms shaped by thousands of years of evolution. He also wrote that non-organic algorithms can also replicate our biological algorithms, regardless of their functionality.

Let’s just imagine that our emotions and feelings are organic algorithms that thrive in our environment. Thriving on our cultural history, upbringing, and life experiences these algorithms can be reverse-engineered. 

If we believe what researchers like Dr. Harari who is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, machines will eventually surpass humans in emotions and will easily manipulate humans.

In a real-life scenario, we humans are pretty bad at expressing our emotions.

Most of us are even ignorant about what emotional triggers we set on each other. Romance frauds and credit card frauds are realistic examples of how bad we are at emotional intelligence. 

I recently read an article, on Shufti Pro, an online fraud prevention firm, about Common Online Scams and was amazed at how we end up being scammed amongst ourselves. 

Fighting on pointless matters, judging people based on societal stereotypes, we don’t understand others’ feelings. On social media the situation is worse, we judge and draw hasty conclusions from comments without even having any knowledge regarding them.

Moreover, we have a biological trait of considering life as the ‘survival of the fittest’. This inclines our attitude towards ego and biases when interacting with others. 

Most people often lie, deceive, and manipulate others to get ahead and hide their wrongdoings. It’s about winning at any cost, regardless of what emotional damage we cause to others.

While humans continue to struggle in understanding emotions, AI is advancing at emotional intelligence rapidly. Cameras in phones are persistent and ubiquitous as the face recognition technology is already smart enough to interpret the smallest details and expressions from our face. 

The most advanced are even capable of distinguishing fake and real emotional expressions on our faces.

Amazon’s emotional recognition technology is employed to get user feedback using their facial expressions. Furthermore, voice recognition and natural language processing algorithms are becoming advanced at figuring out our sentiment and emotional state from the audio.

These technologies and advances in emotion recognition are already way ahead of what we humans are capable of and it’s about time that they will be leading and manipulating humans emotionally even better than humans themselves.

Social media firms like Facebook and Youtube are already gathering data on our choices and using it to display us the content that makes us addicted to these platforms. 

These algorithms gather information and knowledge about our biases, likes, dislikes, and emotional triggers, based on our activity on these platforms.

While AI is advancing and is assumed to surpass humans, there is still a factor involved; algorithms. Designed by humans these algorithms still reflect our biases. But if such biases are removed, it will easily become more emotionally intelligent than us.

As artificial intelligence is getting better at understanding us, people will happily submit their lives to the algorithms. We are approaching an era where AI will use humans as robots to fulfil their goals.