Wed, Mar 6, 2024, 12:20-1:10pm MT, on Zoom
Daniel White
Associate Fellow, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge; Grant Writer, Kōkua Kalihi Valley Comprehensive Family Services, Kalihi, HI
The global growth of interest in building machines with artificial emotional intelligence begs questions of who, what, and how things feel in our increasingly multispecies society. In Japan today, these questions are surprisingly entangled with how technologists interested in futures of human-machine coexistence are envisioning the concept of diversity. Familiar with critiques of the lack of diversity in AI, some companion robot producers have proposed that although the word “diversity” today refers to skin color, gender, and ethnicity, in the future it might equally refer to robots. Such propositions treat robots as agents deserving recognition in a diverse society—as kinds of persons that on account of their ability to offer total acceptance to others might earn social acceptance in return. While such propositions have stimulated new ideas about how diversity in a future society might be extended beyond human members, they have also raised concerns that a robot-inclusive diversity might come at the expense of other humans. This lecture considers the changing notions of diversity in Japan through an exploration of how engineers are translating human affect into machine-readable emotion.