Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Yonck Richard

Author:Yonck, Richard [Yonck, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2017-03-06T23:00:00+00:00

12

MIXING IT UP

Menlo Park, California—November 12, 2033

“Hey! What did I tell you about running through the house?” Abigail calls out after the two young boys who just tore through her home office. At seven and nine years old, Dale and Jerry are her only nephews and today they are really taxing her patience. Abigail had no idea how demanding it would be when she agreed to take care of them while her sister and brother-in-law took a week’s vacation in Maui. A very much needed vacation, she’d since realized.

“May I offer a suggestion?” Abigail’s digital assistant, Mandy, chimes in her micro-earbud.

“I doubt there’s much you can do, Mandy,” Abigail says, exasperated. “The boys don’t have assistants of their own for you to interface with.” It had been a point of considerable contention between Abigail and her sister. A few inconclusive, poorly run studies had questioned the safety of digital personal assistants for children under the age of fourteen. This resulted in a groundswell of hysterical overreaction in which the boys’ parents had been caught up.

“Set up two of your virtual reality teleconferencing rigs for them,” Mandy suggests. “I’ve been observing Dale and Jerry via the room’s security cameras and have remotely interpreted and mapped each one’s emotional makeup. I then assembled an afternoon mix of educational, social, and sports activities along with an incentive strategy that should keep them entertained and out of your hair, while exposing them to a range of new ideas and concepts appropriate for their grade levels. In the meantime, you can get on with your own work and preparing for your date this evening. I promise they’ll be in bed by nine and will sleep solidly through the night.”

Abigail beams at the voice of her longtime digital friend. “Mandy,” she says earnestly. “You’re the best!”

————

As Abigail discovers, there will be many unexpected ways emotionally aware technology will engage and interact with myriad other technologies in our daily world. Despite her own familiarity with affective computing, even she hadn’t considered the ways it might be combined with some of her own household systems. (You’ll recall, Abigail is the CEO of a tremendously successful company within the emotional intelligence technology sector.) This is hardly unusual. One of the things that almost invariably arises with new technologies is the unexpected ways they alter and are altered by the rest of their environment. This will be especially true in the coming decades as we see the development of more and more new affective computing applications and devices.

The next twenty to thirty years are going to see a veritable explosion of technologies and capabilities. As computer processing continues to grow in power, even as it shrinks in size, we’ll see more and more aspects of our world acquire new ways of interacting with us through digital means. Sensors in the environment, smart appliances, programmable matter—the world of the Internet of Things, or IoT, is becoming a reality, and as it does it will totally change the way we interact with our world and with each other.

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