Check out Manna and "Empathy driven AI"

My summer reading included a book called Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future by Marshall Brain,  which described a world with robots, and artificial intelligence (AI). In the book, there were two specific implementations of this technology.  One focused on automating businesses, and the other focused on improving the quality of life. 

I am not sure if we will reach either state, but it was good to get a perspective on how the world could be.  Personally, as a trained data scientist,  I don't envision robots taking over my life.  With any technology,  we need to use it with pragmatism.  AI will enable decision-makers to be aware of their biases and tendencies.  "Based on gut feelings" will be reduced.  At the same time,  all decision-makers shouldn't be making identical decisions since they may not have similar emotions about a decision.  

Speaking about emotions, currently, AI engineers are currently developing  AI algorithms to mimic and sense human emotions  Chatbots, and virtual assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and others want to detect emotion via user interaction and provide a better answer.  AI-driven emotions should strive for better sales and improved customer experience. A Senior Analyst (now former) Allison Snow at Forrester posted a blog entry on November 12, 2018, titled AI Tech Shines A Path To Empathetic Triggers where connects three independent entities empathy, insights, and AI within the context of B2B marketing. On October 14, 2019,  Gartner published the article, Digital Empathy: A New Lever for Earnings Growth by Kristin Moyer, Dave Aron, and Don Scheibenreif.  Gartner typically takes a concept and brands it with its own buzz words.  In this case, Gartner calls AI-driven emotions "Digital Empathy."  

With all innovative ideas, you will find folks who will talk about the dangers of these ideas.  In the article, Empathy in Artificial Intelligence on Medium.com, Jun Wu writes about AI, human emotions, and the ethics around.  Last month Harvard Business Review (HBR) published an article called The Risks of Using AI to Interpret Human Emotions by three Accenture employees (Mark Purdy, John Zealley, and Omaro Museli).  Accenture talks about biases seeping in the AI since AI is nothing more than decisions based on past data.  

Overall the AI-driven empathy concept is entirely new. I wonder how the Nigerian prince scam would work if we were effectively duped into giving money. I feel bad for the security guys, but at the same time, there is a business opportunity. All of these ideas are reflected in the book Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future.  Check out the book!

NOTE: I used the image from Amazon.com.