2021.Dec.03

REPORTS

Report on the 2nd B’AI Book Club
Rana El Kaliouby and Carol Colman, Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology (2020)

On June 22nd, 2021, B’AI Book Club, a book review session by the members of the B’AI Global Forum, held its second meeting online. B’AI Book Club aims to introduce and discuss literature that critically examines the relationship between AI technology and society, such as gender equality issues in the age of AI. In the second meeting, Jooeun Noh, Project Researcher of the B’AI Global Forum, introduced Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology (Currency, 2020) by Rana El Kaliouby.

 

Dr. Rana El Kaliouby is the CEO and co-founder of Affectiva, an Emotion AI startup. Emotion AI refers to the emotion recognition technology. For example, an Emotion AI trained by the data of human face images detects emotions from human facial expressions. This book is more like an autobiography than an academic book, in which the author tells the story of how she developed Emotion AI and launched a start-up company, Affectiva. Readers with no technical knowledge can understand what Emotion AI is since the book also shows the examples of the applications of Emotion AI. In this meeting of B’AI Book Club, the discussion was more focused on the relationship between Emotion AI and society than on the contents of the book.

 

First, the application of Emotion AI was discussed. In this discussion, the doubt was raised that how useful it would be for human communication even if it is technically possible for AI to detect human emotions. While high accuracy is required for Emotion AI to interpret human emotions, the fact is that humans have their own interpretations of other people’s facial expressions, and human relationships are established by taking both “accurate” and “inaccurate” interpretations. In addition, the question was posed that how to apply such technology to a society where people are required to regulate and manage their emotional expressions as part of work as the term “emotional labor” shows. The point is that we need to distinguish between the technical question of whether AI can detect human emotions and the application question of how the technology will function in our society.

 

The second point of discussion was the issue of AI technology and the senses. Aside from the technical issue of whether it is possible for AI to interpret human emotional expressions, the concern that AI reading emotions only from facial signals may lead to ocularcentrism was also discussed. Conversely, it can be said that the very idea that AI can recognize emotions from facial expressions is a testament to the fact that today’s society has already become visual-centric. In any case, humans are beings that recognize the surrounding environment through all of their senses, and there is no doubt that society is an intersection of various senses.

 

This book review meeting emphasized that the question of the development of AI technology and its application are two different things, and that it is important to have a critical imagination of how technology and humans coexist in society, rather than weighing between the benefits of AI technology and the risks of abuse.