Toward Machines With Emotional Intelligence

Abstract

© 2007 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved. For half a century, artificial-intelligence researchers have focused on giving machines linguistic and mathematical-logical reasoning abilities, modelled after the classic linguistic and mathematical-logical intelligences. This chapter describes new research that is giving machines skills of emotional intelligence. Machines have long been able to appear as if they have emotional feelings, but they are now being programmed to also learn when and how to display emotion in ways that enable them to appear empathetic or otherwise emotionally intelligent. They are now being given the ability to sense and recognize expressions of human emotion such as interest, distress, and pleasure, with the recognition that such communication is vital for helping them choose more helpful and less-aggravating behaviour. This chapter presents several examples illustrating new and forthcoming forms of machine emotional intelligence, highlighting applications, together with challenges, to their development.