what it takes to be human
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Herbert A. Simon, a Nobel laureate in economics “for his groundbreaking research into the decision-making process within economic organizations.” Simon was also a visionary in the area of artificial intelligence, and his first notable work in the field, “The Logic Theory Machine,” from 1956, is celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2016. Co-created with Allen Newell, it described the first computer program designed to simulate the problem-solving skills of humans.
Building on Simon’s achievements in the field of artificial intelligence, we take a journey to explore the latest innovations in AI and, most importantly, its human element, to ultimately answer the controversial questions: What physical human characteristics and emotions must a robot have to make people react to it? And, obversely, Can AI recognize human emotions?
Decades have passed since Simon first explored the psychology of human cognition; today AI is more and more present in our lives, be it via customer service or pure entertainment. No matter what its application, the Holy Grail of any successful AI project is its ability to achieve seamless interaction with humans. And at the core is AI’s capability to recognize and react to emotions.
Sadness? Anger? Excitement? Curiosity? Fear? Identifying the key types – and number – of human emotions was tough even for Aristotle who, in the 4th century B.C., identified the following 14: confidence, anger, friendship, fear, calm, unkindness, shame, shamelessness, pity, kindness, indignation, emulation, enmity and envy. Later, Charles Darwin’s book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” suggested that many emotional facial expressions are universal. This subsequently led to the conventional scientific understanding that there are six key emotions: happy, sad, afraid, surprised, angry and disgusted.
More recently, however, psychologists have simplified things even further. According to new research from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow, people’s facial expressions, and the emotions they signal, can be reduced to four “basics”: happy, sad, afraid/surprised and angry/disgusted. These, according to the study, are the main biologically rooted facial signals, while the distinctions between surprise and fear, and between anger and disgust, appear later as more complex socially developed expressions.
Add to this the fact that we as humans are capable of experiencing more than one emotion at a time, and the task of identifying the exact nature of emotions gets even more challenging when it comes to AI and its computational models.
first, what are the basic human emotions, and why are they so important?
Sadness? Anger? Excitement? Curiosity? Fear? Identifying the key