Here’s two articles from the Nov. 2018 Atlantic Magazine, the first of which delves deeply into the human to aural personal assistant connection, and the second, into another sort of deep connection between humans and machines (AI).
The most relatable interlocutor, of course, is the one that can understand the emotions conveyed by your voice, and respond accordingly—in a voice capable of approximating emotional subtlety. Your smart speaker can’t do either of these things yet, but systems for parsing emotion in voice already exist.
Emotion detection—in faces, bodies, and voices—was pioneered about 20 years ago by an MIT engineering professor named Rosalind Picard, who gave the field its academic name: affective computing. “Back then,” she told me, “emotion was associated with irrationality, which was not a trait engineers respected.” 😉
Picard, a mild-mannered, witty woman, runs the Affective Computing Lab, which is part of MIT’s cheerfully weird Media Lab. She and her graduate students work on quantifying emotion.
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“I would claim to you that these tools are not so smart. And maybe one of the reasons why they’re not so smart is because they’re not connected to our brains. Maybe if we could hook those devices into our brains, they could have some idea of what our goals are, what our intent is, and what our frustration is.”
The Alexa article indicates that Alexa is, in meaningful ways, connected to our brain through conversation in our native language, though we might not realize it, And since it can, through that interface, become very smart indeed in years to come, we perhaps might best think of direct neural connections to our brains as another important human AI interface, and not the “only or necessarily best” way. IOW, much of being human is present in our use of language which provides a certain kind of meaning to human existence.
Yes, there’s the intelligence of the body, and the expression of our genotype into a specific and ever changing phenotype…which is another sort of intelligent entity. One we are little aware of, but which makes “meaningful decisions” down at the core machine language level of the human. Perhaps that means we will end up with two very different sorts of connections with AI such as these two articles differentiate.
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