Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the science of making clever machines. It's coming along very well. There are already some phenomenally smart boxes out there, including the ATM, your mobile phone and the automatic landing system on an Airbus A380. People can do all the tasks these machines perform for us, only much more slowly and very much less reliably.
When people think of how machines will help us in the future, the emphasis naturally falls on the performance of rational executive tasks. But one should also envisage a far more exciting scenario, one in which computational power is also directed at the emotional and psychological dimensions of existence. It is time to imagine not merely AI but also, and even more significantly, what we here call AEI: Artificial Emotional Intelligence.
We need AEI rather badly because our emotional frailties dwarf our incapacities in raw mathematics or data management: we make extremely poor decisions about how we should manage relationships. We have little idea what job to focus on and when to quit. We don't know what to spend our money on. We get holidays wrong, have no clue how to repair friendships or handle tricky employees, and fumble as to how to reconcile with our parents.
The emotional intelligence required for these things is in very short supply. It exists, but in isolated and mysterious pockets: a few people seem to cope but on a basis that is desperately private and concealed, the way that a wild strawberry might have seemed before the invention of farming.
Of course, at heart, emotionally wise decisions aren't luck at all. They are the result of our brains resolving certain puzzles very well -- and they are therefore logically also forms of intelligence that can be replicated and improved upon artificially, with the help of microchips and code.
We are at a juncture in history where we can already perceive what is coming: a particular type of scarcity will start to give way to abundance. A transformation that has occurred many times before in different areas of existence -- agriculture, transport and energy -- is about to strike the field of emotional intelligence. We're about to make emotional intelligence as common and as cheap as pencils. We're not used to thinking that the next big thing will be tackling the scarcity of wisdom, but this is what's on the cards.
Six areas that AEI will revolutionize
Knowing yourself is at the heart of directing efforts and communicating inner needs and perspectives to others. The idea of self-knowledge has always had high prestige, but the opportunities for acquiring it have been restricted. It's taken too long, been too chancy or too costly (if sought via therapy).
At present, we are often deeply ignorant about where our talents lie and what our flaws and true interests are. Our consciousness doesn't grasp at all well what is happening to its owner. For example: I might not realise that I am irritable because I'm tired, not because my partner is being obtuse. But AEI will get us the self-knowledge we need. It will map brain activity and alert us in good time as to the reality of our psychological lives.
We will get much better in two areas in particular: knowing what job we should be doing, and knowing whom we should try to form a relationship with, and how.
Today's dating questionnaires and career counselling tests will - from the perspective of 20 years hence -- seem as barbaric and hopeless as medieval brain surgery strikes us now. We will at last be equipped with machines to which we can address the truly important emotional questions of life.
AEI will give us a picture of our inner selves which will stop us making catastrophic errors on the basis of an inability to interpret our emotional functioning and psychological potential.
Education goes desperately wrong, because we're not good at knowing what particular individuals are capable of, what they really need to know, when it's best to try to teach them -- and what manner of instruction will suit them best.
We all know from our own lives that there are moments when we've made remarkable strides and others where progress has been slow, but our society has yet to arrive at sound generalisations. The idea of how you make a "good" teacher is still shockingly mysterious.
People are therefore funnelled, sheep-like, into classrooms and talked at for hours in ways that serve a lot of them rather poorly. But our educational problems aren't just around schools; throughout life - in relationships, at work, in families - we are always stumbling because of deficiencies in learning. AEI will help us to evolve towards the best versions of ourselves. We should -- ideally -- die with far fewer regrets.
We're agreed that high-quality, widely disseminated information is vital to a flourishing society. That's why some news organisations make huge claims about how they keep us informed.
But, in truth, news media feeds our brains in highly inadequate, sporadic and often manic ways. We do need good information, in the right doses, about the right subjects, to help us lead our lives. But we're currently far from getting it.
This matters because the media sets the backdrop to politics: it establishes the general picture of what life is like in our society (of which we witness only a tiny portion first hand) and defines the parameters of what politicians can change and address. Getting the right information into wide circulation, however, is difficult, because our brains are designed to be more engaged by the wildly exceptional, rather than the important and the sober.
In a future with AEI, we'll know how to lead people to information that is genuinely fruitful for them and their nations, rather than merely stories that shock, titillate and horrify. We'll get better media and, in turn, more democratic politics.
Great works of art are, at present, incredibly rare. A Tolstoy, Picasso, Lennon or Louis Kahn are still agonisingly unique. AEI will stop us having to feel so grateful to them. We will, for example, be able to produce novels like those of Tolstoy on an industrial scale, but geared towards our own particular circumstances and cultural references. War and Peace is often appreciated for its wisdom and insight. But the author exercised his mind on understanding the world he knew: that of wealthy Russians living in the 19th century. As his readers, we are left alone to guess the implications for our own radically different lives.
With AEI to hand, we would be able to summon up a Ugandan Tolstoy or an east London Tolstoy: the same level of maturity and compassion, the same verve in characterisation and storytelling, but all focused on what it's most important for us to dwell on.
Consumer society is really about choice, and in so far as it makes us happy (rather than leads us to squander our wealth and energies), it's about wise choice.
This opens up a huge area for AEI. We tend to operate on a mixture of intuition, hope and habit, and are routinely abused by advertisers along the way. We're heavily influenced by what others are doing: impulse plays a big role and we leave much to chance.
AEI will mean encoding consumer intelligence. Just as we might work out a sum in our heads and then check it on a calculator, so we will check our decisions on an AEI device. AEI will reveal how we can be persuaded, moved and motivated to acquire goods and services in line with our true needs. Money will, at last, make us as happy as it can.
It's extremely hard to be wise around relationships. We struggle to communicate, are impatient when we don't get what we want, defensive in discussions, and have trouble talking calmly through hopes and failings around fidelity.
AEI means we will be able to tap into the lessons that others have, often painfully, learned. Each couple will not have to confront each hurdle anew late at night in the bedroom. If you could, at critical moments, (in your head) dial up your most patient, experienced and sensible friend and get them to talk you through an issue, a huge quantity of distress might be avoided. Relationship AEI will give us all access to the friend's wisdom when we most need it.
There are currently some big worries over AI: what if machines take over that are really versions of very cunning, powerful people? But the cure to these is to focus on what sort of intelligence AI should emulate and enhance. Increasing emotional intelligence is key to all that we most value: empathy, creativity, kindness and generosity. Today, the major impediments to progress are all psychological. It's mainly the flaws in our emotional capacities that ruin existence. But we've not yet addressed how to make ourselves more mature. It's been left to the hazards of individual experience. AEI will use technology to reduce the randomness.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
