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Automating Empathy: Decoding Technologies that Gauge Intimate Life
This is an open access title. It is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license. It is available to read and download as a PDF version on the Oxford Academic platform.
We live in a world where artificial intelligence and intensive use of personal data has become normalized. Companies across the world are developing and launching technologies to infer and interact with emotions, mental states, and human conditions. However, the methods and means of mediating information about people and their emotional states are incomplete and problematic.
Automating Empathy offers a critical exploration of technologies that sense intimate dimensions of human life and the modern ethical questions raised by attempts to perform and simulate empathy. It traces the ascendance of empathic technologies from their origins in physiognomy and pathognomy to the modern day and explores technologies in nations with non-Western ethical histories and approaches to emotion, such as Japan. The book examines applications of empathic technologies across sectors such as education, policing, and transportation, and considers key questions of everyday use such as the integration of human-state sensing in mixed reality, the use of neurotechnologies, and the moral limits of using data gleaned through automated empathy. Ultimately, Automating Empathy outlines the key principles necessary to usher in a future where automated empathy can serve and do good.
Drawing insights across ethics, philosophy, and policy, Automating Empathy argues for a pluralistic reconceptualization of empathic technologies to better reflect the intimate dimensions of human life.
We live in a world where artificial intelligence and intensive use of personal data has become normalized. Companies across the world are developing and launching technologies to infer and interact with emotions, mental states, and human conditions. However, the methods and means of mediating information about people and their emotional states are incomplete and problematic.
Automating Empathy offers a critical exploration of technologies that sense intimate dimensions of human life and the modern ethical questions raised by attempts to perform and simulate empathy. It traces the ascendance of empathic technologies from their origins in physiognomy and pathognomy to the modern day and explores technologies in nations with non-Western ethical histories and approaches to emotion, such as Japan. The book examines applications of empathic technologies across sectors such as education, policing, and transportation, and considers key questions of everyday use such as the integration of human-state sensing in mixed reality, the use of neurotechnologies, and the moral limits of using data gleaned through automated empathy. Ultimately, Automating Empathy outlines the key principles necessary to usher in a future where automated empathy can serve and do good.
Drawing insights across ethics, philosophy, and policy, Automating Empathy argues for a pluralistic reconceptualization of empathic technologies to better reflect the intimate dimensions of human life.
304 pages, Paperback
Published October 31, 2023
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December 7, 2023
This book is valuable for its wide survey of tech research in affective computing (in the broadest sense). The chapter on affective interaction in cars is particularly helpful. The separate chapters focus on different areas of affective computing and the groupings are pretty helpful and focused on emerging tech like brain-computer interaction. As well as introducing the research, the author takes a critical stance on it, foregrounding social issues like implicit racism within the design. This echoes work, which the author acknowledges, by Benjamin, Eubanks etc.
Unfortunately, the author seems to make it his aim to name drop as many different philosophers as possible. His grasp of philosophy is not great and his presentation of it is rather thin and disruptive to the flow of the book. He constantly moves from philosopher to philosopher at the level of "Spinoza thought mind and body were unified", "Husserl thought experiences were important". There is little overall synthesis. A particularly annoying aspect of the book is the constant use of "hyperreal" completely outside the context in which Baudrillard intended it (by the author's own definition, his use of "hyperreal" is hyperreal!). His main claim is that emotion concepts are hyperreal because we've accepted their use without knowing exactly what emotions are - so the "metaphor" is treated as real. There is much that is wrong with this (would the word "ideal" not have been more elegant?) and I feel a better grounding in one or two figures of philosophy of science might have served the author better than this grab-bag.
As the author acknowledges, the book is arguing both that you can't detect emotions and that detecting them is unethical. I think this is fine, but I wish there had been a fuller engagement with the science in this area. I am very sympathetic to critiques of basic emotion approaches to affective computing but we need some nuance here - e.g. there is good evidence for Duchenne smiles, and for distinct affect programmes in the brain. This is never really grappled with and it might have been better to just leave it out and explain that the arguments were being made purely on ethical and political grounds.
Finally, the book is certainly winning no writing prizes. There are many example sentences to choose from but let's just stick to the book's final paragraph:
"An inversion of psycho-physiological systems from the universal would allow different conceptions of emotion to be explored, novel self-programmed self/group-understanding, local languages of affect-based communication, and new palettes for creative and therapeutic endeavour. This is smaller, but with care it can be good."
I don't understand why nobody in the book's editing process said "Wait, what do you mean 'This is smaller' - that isn't a thing people say."
Unfortunately, the author seems to make it his aim to name drop as many different philosophers as possible. His grasp of philosophy is not great and his presentation of it is rather thin and disruptive to the flow of the book. He constantly moves from philosopher to philosopher at the level of "Spinoza thought mind and body were unified", "Husserl thought experiences were important". There is little overall synthesis. A particularly annoying aspect of the book is the constant use of "hyperreal" completely outside the context in which Baudrillard intended it (by the author's own definition, his use of "hyperreal" is hyperreal!). His main claim is that emotion concepts are hyperreal because we've accepted their use without knowing exactly what emotions are - so the "metaphor" is treated as real. There is much that is wrong with this (would the word "ideal" not have been more elegant?) and I feel a better grounding in one or two figures of philosophy of science might have served the author better than this grab-bag.
As the author acknowledges, the book is arguing both that you can't detect emotions and that detecting them is unethical. I think this is fine, but I wish there had been a fuller engagement with the science in this area. I am very sympathetic to critiques of basic emotion approaches to affective computing but we need some nuance here - e.g. there is good evidence for Duchenne smiles, and for distinct affect programmes in the brain. This is never really grappled with and it might have been better to just leave it out and explain that the arguments were being made purely on ethical and political grounds.
Finally, the book is certainly winning no writing prizes. There are many example sentences to choose from but let's just stick to the book's final paragraph:
"An inversion of psycho-physiological systems from the universal would allow different conceptions of emotion to be explored, novel self-programmed self/group-understanding, local languages of affect-based communication, and new palettes for creative and therapeutic endeavour. This is smaller, but with care it can be good."
I don't understand why nobody in the book's editing process said "Wait, what do you mean 'This is smaller' - that isn't a thing people say."
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