What should we do with emotion AI? Should we regulate, ban, promote, or re-imagine it? Emotion AI, a class of affective computing technologies used in personal and social computing, comprises emergent and controversial techniques aiming to classify human emotion and other affective phenomena. Industry, policy, and scientific actors debate potential benefits and harms, arguing for polarized futures ranging from panoptic expansion to complete bans. Emotion AI is proposed, deployed, and sometimes withdrawn in collaborative contexts such as education, hiring, healthcare, and service work. Proponents expound these technologies' benefits for well-being and security, while critics decry privacy harms, civil liberties risks, bias, and shaky scientific foundations, and gaps between technologies' capabilities and how they are marketed and legitimized. This panel brings diverse disciplinary perspectives into discussion about the history of emotions-as an example of 'intimate' data-in computing, how emotion AI is legitimized, people's experiences with and perceptions of emotion AI in social and collaborative settings, emotion AI's development practices, and using design research to re-imagine emotion AI. These issues are relevant to the CSCW community in designing, evaluating, and regulating algorithmic sensing technologies including and beyond emotion-sensing.
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What should we do with Emotion AI? Towards an Agenda for the Next 30 Years
Semantic Scholar · Computer Science · 2024
Abstract
What should we do with emotion AI? Should we regulate, ban, promote, or re-imagine it? Emotion AI, a class of affective computing technologies used in personal and social computing, comprises emergent and controversial techniques aiming to classify human emotion and other affective phenomena. Industry, policy, and scientific actors debate potential benefits and harms, arguing for polarized futures ranging from panoptic expansion to complete bans. Emotion AI is proposed, deployed, and sometimes withdrawn in collaborative contexts such as education, hiring, healthcare, and service work. Proponents expound these technologies' benefits for well-being and security, while critics decry privacy harms, civil liberties risks, bias, and shaky scientific foundations, and gaps between technologies' capabilities and how they are marketed and legitimized. This panel brings diverse disciplinary perspectives into discussion about the history of emotions-as an example of 'intimate' data-in computing, how emotion AI is legitimized, people's experiences with and perceptions of emotion AI in social and collaborative settings, emotion AI's development practices, and using design research to re-imagine emotion AI. These issues are relevant to the CSCW community in designing, evaluating, and regulating algorithmic sensing technologies including and beyond emotion-sensing.