Designing AI That Knows How You Feel

It's a bright April day in Boston, and Gabi Zijderveld, a pioneer in the field of emotional artificial intelligence, is trying to explain why teaching robots to feel is as important as teaching them to think. "We live in a world surrounded by all these super-advanced technologies, hyper-connected devices, AI systems with super cognitive abilities -- or, as I like to say, lots of IQ but absolutely no EQ," says Zijderveld, chief marketing officer of Affectiva, the startup that spun out of the MIT Media Lab 10 years ago to build emotionally intelligent machines. "Just like humans that are successful in business and in life -- they have high emotional intelligence and social skills -- we should expect the same with technology, especially for these technologies that are designed to interact with humans." Giving machines a soul has been a dream of scientists, and sci-fi writers, for decades. But until recently, the idea of robots with heart was the stuff of moviemaking.