It’s been a long night and you have driven for over 12 hours. The exhaustion is such that you are starting to blackout. As your eyes close and your head drops, the car slows down, moves to the shoulder, and stops. You wake up and realize your car saved your life. This is just one of many examples of how emotional AI can do good.
It doesn’t take much to see the ethical challenges of computer emotion recognition. Worse case scenarios of control and abuse quickly pop into mind. In this blog, I will explore the potential of emotional AI for human flourishing through 4 examples. We need to examine these technologies with a holistic view that weighs their benefits against their risks. Hence, here are 4 examples of how affecting computing could make life better.
1. Alert distracted drivers
Detecting signs of fatigue or alcohol intoxication early enough can be the difference between life and death. This applies not only to the driver but also to passengers and occupants of nearby vehicles. Emotional AI can detect blurry eyes, excessive blinking, and other facial signs that the driver is losing focus. As this mental state is detected early, the system can intervene through many means.
For example, it could alert the driver that they are too tired to drive. It could lower the windows or turn on loud music to jolt the driver into focus. More extreme interventions would include shocking the drivers’ hands through the steering wheel, and also slowing or stopping the car in a safe area.
As an additional benefit, this technology could also detect other volatile mental states such as anger, mania, and euphoria. This could lead to interventions like changing temperature, music, or even locking the car to keep the driver inside. In effect, this would not only reduce car accidents but could also diminish episodes of road rage.
2. Identify Depression in Patients
As those who suffer from depression would attest, the symptoms are not always clear to patients themselves. In fact, some of us can go years suffering the debilitating impacts of mental illness and think it is just part of life. This is especially true for those who live alone and therefore do not have the feedback of another close person to rely on.
Emotional AI trained to detect signs of depression in the face could therefore play an important role in moving clueless patients into awareness. While protecting privacy, in this case, is paramount, adding this to smartphones or AI companions could greatly help improve mental health.
Our faces let out a lot more than we realize. In this case, they may be alerting those around us that we are suffering in silence.
3. Detect emotional stress in workplaces
Workplaces can be toxic environments. In such cases, the fear of retaliation may keep workers from being honest with their peers or supervisors. A narrow focus on production and performance can easily make employees feel like machines. Emotional AI systems embedded through cameras and computer screens could detect a generalized increase in stress by collecting facial data from multiple employees. This in turn could be sent over to responsible leaders or regulators for appropriate intervention.
Is this too invasive? Well, it depends on how it is implemented. Many tracking systems are already present in workplaces where employee activity in computers and phones are monitored 24-7. Certainly, this could only work in places where there is trust, transparency and consent. It also depends on who has access to this data. An employee may not be comfortable with their bosses having this data but may agree to ceding this data to an independent group of peers.
4. Help autistic children socialize in schools
The last example shows how emotional AI can play a role in education. Autistic children process and respond to social queues differently. In this case, emotional AI in devices or a robot could gently teach the child to both interpret and respond to interactions with less anxiety.
This is not an attempt to put therapists or special-needs workers out of a job. It is instead an important enhancement to their essential work. The systems can be there to augment, expand and inform their work with each individual child. It can also provide a consistency that humans also fail to provide. This is especially important for kids who tend to thrive in structured environments. As in the cases above, privacy and consent must be at the forefront.
These are just a few examples of the promise of emotional AI. As industries start discovering and perfecting emotional AI technology, more use cases will emerge.
How does reading these examples make you feel? Do they sound promising or threatening? What other examples can you think of?