Automating Empathy

Description

This is an open access title. It is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license. It is available to read and download as a PDF version on the Oxford Academic platform.

We live in a world where artificial intelligence and intensive use of personal data has become normalized. Companies across the world are developing and launching technologies to infer and interact with emotions, mental states, and human conditions. However, the methods and means of mediating information about people and their emotional states are incomplete and problematic.

Automating Empathy offers a critical exploration of technologies that sense intimate dimensions of human life and the modern ethical questions raised by attempts to perform and simulate empathy. It traces the ascendance of empathic technologies from their origins in physiognomy and pathognomy to the modern day and explores technologies in nations with non-Western ethical histories and approaches to emotion, such as Japan. The book examines applications of empathic technologies across sectors such as education, policing, and transportation, and considers key questions of everyday use such as the integration of human-state sensing in mixed reality, the use of neurotechnologies, and the moral limits of using data gleaned through automated empathy. Ultimately, Automating Empathy outlines the key principles necessary to usher in a future where automated empathy can serve and do good.

Drawing insights across ethics, philosophy, and policy, Automating Empathy argues for a pluralistic reconceptualization of empathic technologies to better reflect the intimate dimensions of human life.

About the author:

Andrew McStay is Professor of Technology and Society and Director of The Emotional AI Lab at Bangor University, UK. He is the author of books, articles, and chapters assessing emergent technologies and their social implications. His work has covered cross-cultural social analysis of emotional AI, extended reality, and personal data stores. Active in the technology standards development community, he also serves as an advisor to policy organisations, NGOs, and as a critical friend to several start-ups.

Reviews

"In this innovative and powerful text, McStay (Bangor Univ., UK) provides both a thorough description and an epistemic and ethical assessment of contemporary technologies designed to emulate, interpret, and express empathy...this text stands out as a pioneering and enlightening piece, meriting reexamination for its profound insights into the intersection of technology, ethics, and human emotion. Essential. All readership levels." - Choice

Table of contents

Chapter 1: Automating Empathy
SECTION I: THEORY AND ETHICS

Chapter 2: Hyperreal Emotion
Chapter 3: Assessing the Physiognomic Critique
Chapter 4: Hybrid Ethics
Chapter 5: The Context Imperative: Extractivism, Japan, and Holism
SECTION II: APPLICATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

Chapter 6: Positive Education
Chapter 7: Automating Vulnerability: Sensing Interiors
Chapter 8: Hybrid Work: Automated for the People?
Chapter 9: Waveforms of Human Intention: Towards Everyday Neurophenomenology
Chapter 10: Selling Emotions: Moral Limits of Intimate Data Markets
Chapter 11: Uncertainty for Good: Inverting Automated Empathy
References