Are We Ready To Create?
We as humans have the insticitve urge to press forward and improve, a quality that has allowed us to become emotionally and cognitively sentiant. Now that we are entering an advanced age of human-machine interaction, we have to start asking the tough questions about the evolvement of AI into the human experience. We as humans are about as imperfect as they come, so when breaching a frontier like AI development, we have to make sure that a thoughtout intelligent approach to designing intelligent machines is taken which will enrich the experience for humans. This idea brings to light the important question of the emotional intelligence of the developer that we must observe objectivly. Personally I have found that in my darkest hours, the skill that was cultivated most was indeed emotional intelligence. It is these hard lessons in emotional intelligence that has shaped me into the intellectualy curious person I am currently. Although all this can seem dark at times, I beleive that the forementioned technologies are generally in the hands of the world’s smartest people that all have their own idea of where to take the technology. This indeed is a natural evolution and building block for the future human-machine interaction.
In Sophie Kleber’s article “It’s Time to Design Emotionally Intelligent Machines”, the realization that the biggest hurdle in the process of creating an emotionally cognitive relationship between humans and machine may be the limits of current emotional intelligence amongst the human population. Kleber’s logic is one of caution and correctness, the logic I believe developers and the public alike needs to be more educated about the human-machine relationship.
Now that we have identified the limitation of human emotional intelligence in designing, we must work on steps to take to build the average emotional intelligence of not only developers of AI, but the end user as well. I believe this can be done if taken with a long term view of building emotional intelligence slowly from childhood. The world is just now coming around to the idea of the mind taking precedence to the body, and with this changes will need to be made accordingly in the education system. To build emotional intelligence I believe it is important to be allowed to fail and push boundaries, because at these points is where the idea of the self can materialize into their true nature.
The human-machine relationship will be like any relationship, where people learn the best way to interact and adapt to the relationship for maximum effiency. We must start nuturing the building of emotional intelligence as a exciting frontier to get people excited to learn who they really are and how their cognitive experience not only effects the internal self but also the external world. With any level of success we as humans will build better advanced systems for the human-machine relationship, laying the ground work for the next substantive step in the realm of AI.
Peter Shortino
