How Corporations Will Use Artificial Empathy to Sell Us More Shit - Artificial Intelligence Online

Empathy is a tricky business. The range and complexity of human emotion makes it difficult, if not impossible, to ever really understand how someone else is feeling. Nevertheless, empathy is considered to be a crucial aspect of what makes us human--indeed, our brains appear to be hardwired for it. So perhaps it won't come as much of a surprise that as machine learning becomes ever more sophisticated and capable of mimicking some of the most complex functions of the human brain, figuring out a way to teach a computer empathy is quickly becoming a business in itself. Known as artificial empathy, the idea here is to train machines to recognize social signals from humans, aka'visual data,' and then produce an appropriate response.