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WELLBEING AI RESEARCH INSTITUTE
EMOTIONS AND AI
Building a future in which we understand our emotions
For a long time, emotions have been considered some form of parasites of our mental experience and cognitive life, with the ideal of rationality being pure logical thinking.
Modern research has shown us how wrong this view of emotion is.
In his beautiful book, Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio makes the case for emotions being mental experiences of body states, which arise as the brain interprets these states. In effect, much of modern research tells us that without emotions we could not make decisions, and that emotions are in fact as reasonable as reason itself, they just present certain types of information to us in a more punchy, direct manner than longer slower thought and reason can.
We know that an understanding and acceptance of our own emotions is essential to wellbeing, and that people experience a much more satisfying and richer life when they can process their emotions well.
One would think Artificial intelligence to be the pinnacle of logical thinking, and to have nothing to do with emotion at all. However machines do not exist in a void, they need to interact with their human and beautifully emotional users. Whether emotions actually having feelings of their own would benefit their reasoning is a case yet to be made, but it is clear that their understanding of emotion can make human-machine interaction smoother in a wide variety of cases.
A wide variety of use cases which involve the recognition of human emotions are currently being explored in the domain of affective technologies.
An exciting case from the human wellbeing perspective is about building AI technologies that support humans to better understand and process their emotional life, to improve access to their full emotional palette and enable them to better interact with peers in other (sometimes hard to understand) emotional states.
Would you like to find out how AI can support mental wellbeing, and emotional processing? Would you like to enable such a technology yourself through your expertise or entrepreneurial skill?