Artificial Emotional Intelligence and the Intimate Politics of Robotic Sociality

ABSTRACT

This article examines Artificial Emotion Intelligence (AEI) and its application in social robots. It argues that AEI and social robotics intensify practices of data-capture and algorithmic governance by extending the spatial reach of digital surveillance deeper into intimate spaces and individual psyches, with the goal of manipulating human emotional and behavioural responses. The analysis demonstrates the need to more thoroughly engage the multiplicity of theoretical and applied approaches to building artificial intelligence, to question assumptions as to the kinds of intelligence being created, and to consider how a diversity of AI systems infiltrate and reshape the spaces of everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• Artificial intelligence
• social robots
• emotion
• algorithmic governmentality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Despite the distinctions between ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ in geography and related disciplines (Pile, 2010), computer scientists and engineers working in AEI tend to use the terms interchangeably. As a result, much of the social science and humanities literature about AEI has likewise not drawn a clear distinction (Wilson, 2010). For this reason, both words appear in different moments throughout this article in reference to the work of AI engineers and their commentators. In my own analysis, I attempt to differentiate between the two, recognizing the non-representational, pre-subjective nature of affect and its representation, categorization, and encoding in digital systems and other media as emotion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Casey R. Lynch

Casey R. Lynch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research interests include the politics and ethics of techno-capitalism and emerging digital technologies, imaginaries of urban futures, geographic thought, and critical social theory.