An AI that can feel falls in line with the hyped concept of Artificial General Intelligence or AGI, but experts are divided over its prospects.
An AI that can feel falls in line with the hyped concept of Artificial General Intelligence or AGI, but experts are divided over its prospects.
Why should an AI get feelings? The possibility itself seems implausible. To start, an emotional AI would provide a higher degree of social comfort and more accurate machine-human interaction to make lives easier.
Imagine Google's Duplex AI put on emotional steroids. But whether an AI can develop feelings is inherently linked to its ability to handle emotions.
Experts believe that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will eventually be able to replicate the most intrinsically human traits, handling feelings being one of them, but that future is still far off.
Current forms of AI are trained to study and mimic emotions – with or without a specified level of courtesy and empathy – but it cannot have emotions of its own brimming on a chip or a cloud server.
Experts are divided on how far we are from an AGI, but in a world where an AI continues to struggle with day-to-day multi-tasking, it will take at least a decade for such artificial intelligence to break cover.
The best examples are multimodal emotion AI and natural language processing, which can provide insight into a person's mood using audio-visual cues.