human flourishing Archives

4 Surprising Ways Emotional AI is Making Life Better

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?

Hybrid Intelligence: When Machines and Humans Work Together

In a previous blog, I argued that the best way to look into AI was not from a machine versus human perspective but more from a human PLUS machine paradigm. That is, the goal of AI should not be replacement but augmentation. Artificial Intelligence should be about enhancing human flourishing rather than simply automating human activities. Hence, I was intrigued to learn about the concept of HI (Hybrid Intelligence). HI is basically a manifestation of augmentation when human intelligence works together with machine intelligence towards a common goal.

As usual, the business world leads in innovation, and in this case, it is no different. Hence, I was intrigued to learn about Cindicator, a startup that combines the collective intelligence of human analysts with machine learning models to make investment decisions. Colin Harper puts it this way:

Cindicator fuses together machine learning and market analysis for asset management and financial analytics. The Cindicator team dubs this human/machine predictive model Hybrid Intelligence, as it combines artificial intelligence with the opinions of human analysts “for the efficient management of investors’ capital in traditional financial and cryptomarkets.”

This is probably the first enterprise to approach investment management from an explicitly hybrid approach. You may find other examples in which investment decisions are driven by analysts and others that rely mostly on algorithms. This approach seeks to combine the two for improved results.

How Does Hybrid Intelligence Work?

One could argue that any example of machine learning is at its core hybrid intelligence. There is some truth to that. Every exercise in machine learning requires human intelligence to set it up and tune the parameters. Even as some of these tasks are now being automated, one could still argue that the human imprint of intelligence is still there.

Yet, this is different. In the Cindicator example, I see a deliberate effort to harness the best of both machines and humans.

On the human side, the company is harnessing the wisdom of crowds by aggregating analysts’ insights. The reason why this is important is that machine learning can only learn from data and not all information is data. Analysts may have inside information that is not visible in the data world and can therefore bridge that gap. Moreover, human intuition is not (yet) present in machine learning systems. Certain signals require a sixth sense that only humans have. For example, a human analyst may catch deceptive comments from company executives that would pass unnoticed by algorithms.

On the machine side, the company developed multiple models to uncover predictive patterns from the data available. This is important because humans can only consider a limited amount of scenarios. That is one reason why AI has beaten humans in games where it could consider millions of scenarios in seconds. Their human counterparts had to rely on experience and hunches. Moreover, machine learning models are superior tools for finding significant trends in vast data, which humans would often overlook.

Can Hybrid Intelligence Lead to Human Flourishing?

HI holds much promise in augmenting rather than replacing human intelligence. At its core, it starts from the principle that humans can work harmoniously with intelligent machines. The potential for its uses is limitless. An AI aided approach can supercharge research for the cure of diseases, offer innovative solutions to environmental problems and even tackle intractable social ills with humane solutions.

This is the future of work: collective human intelligence partnering with high-performing Artificial Intelligence to solve difficult problems, create new possibilities and beautify the world.

Much is said about how many jobs AI will replace. What is less discussed is the emergence of new industries made possible by the partnership between intelligent machines and collective human wisdom. A focus on job losses assumes an economy of scarcity where a fixed amount of work is available to be filled by either humans or machines. An abundance perspective looks at the same situation and sees the empowerment of humans to reach new heights. Think about how many problems remain to be solved, how many endeavors are yet to be pursued, and how much innovation is yet to be unleashed.

Is this optimist future scenario inevitable? Not by a long shot. The move from AI to HI will take time, effort and many failures. Yet, looking at AI as an enabler rather than a threat is a good start. In fact, I would say that the best response to the AI threat is not returning to a past of dumb machines but lies in the partnership between machine and human entities steering innovation for the flourishing of our planet. Only HI can steer AI towards sustainable flourishing.

There is work to do, folks. Let’s get on with the business of creating HI for a better world!

How Can Humans Flourish?

In previous blogs, I often used the phrase “AI for human flourishing.” In this blog, I want to explore what human flourishing is.

What is Human Flourishing?

I learned of this concept still in seminary when taking classes on ethics, mission and ministry. It is a new term that encompasses three levels of well-being: emotional, psychological and social. It connotes a state in which people are thriving. This may or may not be accompanied by material wealth but it is broader to include less tangible factors such as joy, connection to others and personal growth.

This concept initiated a shift in my thinking away from concrete measures like getting a job, financial compensation, church numerical growth and decisions for Christ (a favorite in evangelical circles) to broader measures of impact. One can be thriving even while staying in the same place or job. One can be maturing even through hardships. One can become more loving even when circumstances worsen.

Human Flourishing and Spiritual Growth

From a Christian perspective, human flourishing is analogous to spiritual growth. While the first focus on good emotions, the latter focus on virtue. Yet, there is no reason to believe one is opposed to the other. In fact, I would venture to guess that true spiritual health should lead to overall well-being even if that is not the case at first. Take the case of the virtue of forgiveness for example, which now has proven to be beneficial to one’s health. This is just one example as how spiritual growth correlates with human flourishing.

I also like how the idea of flourishing points to the image of a garden. Plants in a garden do not only grow in size, they also produce fruits. In the same way, spiritual growth manifests itself in the fruits of human flourishing. The well-being translates into personal and social thriving. It manifests itself in healthy relationships, greater personal focus, mastery of new skills, perseverance to complete difficult problems and overcome the daily challenges of life and work. The individual that flourishes will inspire flourishing in others as this virtuous cycle spills over to those around her.

The main point here is that those concepts are interconnected. To focus on spiritual growth without seeing it reflected in human flourishing makes the first incomplete. In fact, the connection between spiritual growth and human flourishing reflects Jesus’ insistence that we would know a tree by its fruits. That is, It cannot be an internal change if it does not translate into visible change.

A Picture of Human Flourishing

As I try to describe it, I ponder on the gift and privilege of being a parent. Seeing my children grow gives me most vivid picture of human flourishing. I see them growing in knowledge, character and skill in many areas. I celebrate with them, every milestone from mastering the basic skills of speaking, reading and learning to be kind. Slowly I realize how fast they are growing, how beautifully they are flourishing. They are not following the same path or becoming the same person. Yet, each one of them is reflecting their own flourishing in becoming more like their own selves.

My dream for AI theology is that we do not stay in the realm of the abstract but that this conversation translates into concrete human flourishing. It is not just about a transfer of knowledge but an unlocking of potential that bears fruit. That’s why I am interested in innovative forms of education that harness the possibilities of technology as a tool for human flourishing. As a tool, technology gives us the “know-how” to take the raw material we have to use it to solve problems. I would love to see many empowered with the knowledge to build AI solutions that solve social problems.

Let us keep dreaming.

Tag: human flourishing