smiley

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/ai-doesnt-know-feel/"></div>“Awkward giggles,” confusion, and nervousness: on October 21, <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-new-ai-tool-can-spot-if-you-are-nervous-or-confused/">Fujitsu Labs</a> announced their software would be able to detect all of these emotional expressions and feelings. They’re not alone in their plans. In May, journalists reported Amazon was working on a wearable device that will be able to detect its owner’s feelings. It will “<a href="https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/5/23/18636839/amazon-wearable-emotions-report">sync with a smartphone app</a>,” and supposedly be capable of detecting “<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-23/amazon-is-working-on-a-wearable-device-that-reads-human-emotions">joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, boredom&#8230;”</a> Meanwhile, <a href="https://go.affectiva.com/auto">Affectiva</a> is promoting the idea that its software might be able to tell you when you’ve <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/social-app-tells-you-when-youre-mean/592480/">hurt people’s feelings on social media</a>, while the Dutch company <a href="https://braingineers.com/">Braingineers</a> touts its alleged ability to discern how “users really feel.”
These proposed inventions are based on shaky understandings of human psychology which presume that emotions are concrete, detectable entities that can be reliably recognized and identified across time and space. Such a view comes from Darwin; it was resuscitated in the 1960s by psychologist Paul Ekman, and still circulates widely today (<a href="https://qz.com/1392130/silicon-valley-thinks-everyone-feels-the-same-six-emotions/">especially in Silicon Valley</a>, as Rich Firth-Godbehere has incisively noted). Darwin, Ekman, et al. claim that there are universal emotions, hardwired into all people, that can be found in all cultures and eras, and which are expressed the same way everywhere.
Such claims, however, have been undermined by path-breaking research in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret-ebook/dp/B00QPHURT6">psychology</a>, <a href="http://politybooks.com/what-is-the-history-of-emotions/">history</a>, and <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/what-does-anthropology-say-about-the-emotional-lives-of-others">anthropology</a>, which have shown how much feelings vary in different times and places. Some feelings that Amazon and other Emotion AI companies promise to detect — like boredom — didn’t even exist until the 1850s in America. (That’s when the word was first invented.) Other feelings they promise to identify, like anger, have existed for far longer, but their expression and meaning have been dramatically reshaped over time — and are still changing before our eyes. For instance, 19th-century white men might brawl and fight to express their fury, or gather for “indignation meetings” in public squares. In contrast, 20th-century office workers seethed inwardly and learned to smile while keeping their anger under wraps, worried that their tempers might interfere with office collegiality and personnel department rules. And now, with the rise of social media, Americans are finding new ways to express the feeling, often by typing on their phones. <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674983700">Yet in interviews we conducted</a> with a wide range of Americans, we found that many had styles of online anger which differed dramatically from one another. Some expressed anger at social injustice, others trolled; still others bit their tongues and held their fire. Which of these expressions would Amazon’s device term anger? How would it know what it was witnessing (or spying on)? Would it be able to differentiate between righteous indignation and, say, the feeling that comes from being “hangry”?
Seemingly unaware of the complex cultural influences on feeling, companies that aspire to read emotions treat them as unchanging and primordial, so easily recognized and evaluated that even an algorithm can do it. Their efforts are worrisome not just because they may create expensive and largely useless technology; they’re troubling as well because they may end up training us to express our feelings in ways that conform with machines’ expectations, thereby homogenizing the rich array of emotional cultures that exist within the US, and across the globe.
If these devices were to tell us what we are feeling — or what they think we are — they wouldn’t just be reporting our emotions, but instead they would be giving them new shape. The words a culture uses to define moods, the connotations and values these labels carry, all are part of how we understand what we’re experiencing. A 19th-century American sitting alone, for instance, might have described herself as experiencing solitude, while a 21st-century American by himself might describe himself as lonely. The labels we (or, theoretically, our devices) apply to our feelings shape and define them.
Beyond that, all technologies have embedded within them social norms and expectations. Facebook, for instance, suggests one should have hundreds if not thousands of friends, and in the process, has dramatically reshaped ideas of what it means to be isolated or connected, lonely or sociable. Meanwhile, Amazon suggests humans are — or should be — endlessly acquisitive, and teaches them how to be. These technologies are not neutral bystanders to our feelings, but instead exert powerful forces over them, normalizing some experiences, discounting others.
A growing number of commentators grasp that there is an emotional problem with many of the software platforms being created. And some have tried to address it. In Silicon Valley, the common wisdom is that more humane technologies will emerge when we better understand what humanity is and design technologies that cater to this humanity. This is the line of thinking that Tristan Harris — former Google tech ethicist and founder of the Center for Humane Technology — has been espousing. But Harris, like most of Silicon Valley, assumes users are the same emotionally; that they all have the same feelings. As Harris sees it, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have been bedeviled by a problem of emotional ergonomics: he uses the image of someone sitting in a chair to illustrate his point. When we sit in chairs, they either conform to our backs or they don’t. And when they don’t, they cause injury. Harris conceives of the relationship between our moods and our social media along similar lines. Instead of producing algorithms that appeal to users’ better natures, he contends that Facebook and Twitter have been “downgrading” our humanity by designing systems that encourage us to express anger and which appeal to our primordial, reptilian instincts.
This is welcome critique — we desperately need to revamp social media to foster a new and kinder emotional culture. But Harris’ model only takes us so far, for he assumes that there are universal emotions, and that software either fosters good ones or bad ones.
Ultimately, we need a more sophisticated understanding of the way human emotions and technologies interact. We aren’t static creatures whose emotional essence can be determined and around which some “humane” technology can be built that conforms to that essence. Instead it’s better to think of humanity and emotions as plastic categories that evolve across time, across cultures, and space. We shape our technology and our technology in turn reshapes our emotional lives.
Thus conceived, tech doesn’t stand apart from who we are emotionally — it doesn’t just read us from afar. Instead it is — and always has been — an intrinsic part of our emotional destiny, shaping and reshaping our inner lives. It can amplify and deepen the astounding emotional variety that humans currently express. Or it can be deployed to extinguish or homogenize emotions and cultures, making feelings across the globe appear as standardized as the emoji we increasingly rely on to express them. Intentionally or unintentionally, Silicon Valley is taking this latter path. Embedded in their algorithms is a philosophy of conformity. Their project is to put our emotions into uniform categories. In the interest of expanding rather than contracting the human experience we should resist this project.
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Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt are authors of <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674983700" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-auth="NotApplicable">Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter</a> (Harvard University Press, 2019).
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AI Doesn’t Know How You Feel

prideprivacy

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/pride-privacy/"></div>In an age of eroding privacy, many of us may wonder why we are so willing to share our most private details with the rest of the world. The common wisdom is that Silicon Valley taught us how to promote ourselves and taught us to eschew privacy. After all, we often blame social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for making us into a nation of self-revealing narcissists. But while social media facilitates this behavior, it is not solely responsible for it. Silicon Valley is the culmination, but not the origin of our obsession with self-presentation.
To understand how the national preoccupation with self-presentation took root, one needs to go back two centuries. For men and woman living in the 18th and 19th centuries, our cavalier exhibitionism would have felt foreign. Most believed that it was pointless and wrong to be proud of one’s achievements or possessions, since the grave would, sooner rather than later, steal those things back from you. Connecticut preacher Solomon Williams explained this to his congregation in 1752: “Our Days on Earth are as a Shadow … it is a vain Life. A Shadow is a thin airy Image, which has no Substance in it; … It flies from you, and runs away as fast as you pursue it.” Because life was itself vain, colonial preachers counseled humility. As Williams put it, “we should live in an humble sense of our meanness …” In today’s world, however, such advice seems out of tempo with the times.
The shift in disposition from William’s day to our own is the result of two hundred years of technological change and capitalist growth. The development of the postal service and low postage rates in the 19th century encouraged letter writing and taught Americans to talk about themselves in ways they had previously resisted. As a letter writing manual of the time gently advised: “The friendly letter is the very place for egotism.” The invention of photography in 1839 also served to awaken people’s sense of self as well as the nascent desire to express that self. For colonial Americans, a painted portrait was something only the affluent could afford. But by the late 19th century, a small photograph cost only 25 cents, and as a result, Americans of all races and classes were flocking to photography studios to have their picture taken. Finally, mirrors, which had been scarce in colonial times, became ubiquitous in middle-class households by the late 19th century, further amplifying Americans’ growing sense of self and how that self might appear to others.
These technologies did not immediately or completely banish older worries about vanity and the transience of life. Indeed, many hoped these new tools might be morally improving. For instance, early commentators on photography believed the camera would eliminate vanity, for unlike portrait painters, who might flatter their subjects, the camera was more honest, and showed all of one’s flaws. Some also patronized photography studios precisely because they realized life was short. Grieving families frequently had photographs taken of their recently deceased kin, so much so that historians estimate that in the 1840s and 1850s there were more photos of dead children than living ones. And many photographers capitalized on this belief, urging their customers to “Secure the shadow, while the substance yet remains &#8230;”
Yet while Victorians carried these older notions of vanity in their heads, strictures on the behavior were loosening. With photography, Americans became accustomed to studying their own images. And with the spread of the postal service they filled the mails with letters and photos telling friends and family of their recent doings. These were the ancestors of Facebook and Instagram posts. With the growth of consumer capitalism in the early 20th century, the idea of sinful vanity declined further.  To spur consumption, advertisers appealed directly to people’s egotism and pride. In 1914, for example, one clothier ran an ad asking, “Has your real vanity been tickled lately?” Also epitomizing this shift was the emergence of the word “vanity mirror,” which seemed to legitimize preening and perfecting one’s self-presentation.
As a result, Americans over the course of the 20th century gradually became accustomed to celebrating themselves in word and image, and sharing that self with others. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, then, did not create these trends; they have merely amplified them.
For the last eight years, we’ve been studying such emotional transitions, trying to understand how technologies — from the telegraph to Twitter — have reshaped Americans’ emotional lives over the past two centuries. We’ve read the diaries and letters of 19th- and 20th-century Americans and interviewed 21st-century men and women living through the technological revolutions of our own day. And many of them have told us how their heightened sense of self has led them to think about promoting and marketing their identities, and increased their willingness to divulge intimate details about themselves to others. Indeed, some of the younger people we talked with told us it was essential to their social life to do so.
Yet in spite of technology and consumer capitalism, we are still vaguely aware of vanity’s older meaning. We police people who we think are taking too many selfies. We mock the duck face. And we’re uneasy about those, like our president, who have excessive self-regard. However, the words that we use to frame this concern have changed. Where pride and vanity were all the currency in Solomon William’s day, today we increasingly describe chronic selfie posters as narcissistic (a term that was not invented until the late 19th century). To be sure this new word still has a negative ring to it. But it emerged from the field of psychology rather than from religion. It pathologizes pride rather than condemning it as a sin. Sometimes too we use the word over-sharer, or frame critiques in terms of privacy. We don’t condemn people for sharing and celebrating their accomplishments; instead, we merely worry about them being careless about where they do this. As a result, the existential dimensions of vanity, and its ability to remind us that we’re mortal and that the human condition is limited, are generally lost to modern-day Americans.
In the age of surveillance capitalism, it is rapidly becoming a truism that the details from our private lives are fueling the fire in Silicon Valley. It is also true that the Valley gained access to this fuel as a result of technologies that amplify our desire to share every last detail of ourselves. But the tech companies did not manufacture that desire out of thin air. It was handed to them by a long history of technological change that fundamentally reshaped how we feel about self-expression and vanity.
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Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt are authors of <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674983700">Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter</a> (Harvard University Press, 2019).
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Photo: &#8220;Vanitas&#8221; by Harmen Steenwijck c. 1640.
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Pride and Privacy

Susan Matt is an historian of the emotions, and a faculty member in the Department of History, at Weber State. She’s author of&nbsp;Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930&nbsp;(University of Pennsylvania Press) and&nbsp;Homesickness: An American History&nbsp;(Oxford University Press). Her writing has appeared in The&nbsp;New York Times, The&nbsp;Wall Street Journal, among other places.