One of the fundamental flaws of the Emotion AI products being developed by companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google is that their automated algorithms decontextualize human feelings. Scanning our faces or measuring our skin conductivity, the technology attempts to classify our emotions simply as “sad” or “angry”, without having any idea at all what we might be upset about, and why. The basic emotions they work with lack heft because they don’t live in the real world.
As a new scientific review of the flimsy foundations of the Emotion AI industry warns, “Efforts to simply ‘read out’ people’s internal states from an analysis of their facial movements alone, without considering various aspects of context, are at best incomplete and at worst entirely lack validity, no matter how sophisticated the computational algorithms.”
Entomologist E.O. Wilson doesn’t just live in the real world. He gets down on his hands and knees and studies it up close. Wilson studies those animals who represent our idea of what it is to be tiny. He has devoted his life to the study of ants.
Rather than dismissing them as insignificant, he finds meaning in ants that is far outside the scale of their physical size. “Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life” he wrote.
Psychologist Erich Fromm coined the term Biophilia, but it was Wilson who popularized the term. “To explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development,” Wilson explained. “To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion, our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hope rises on its currents.”
For a scientist to write about religion, spirit, and hope as a way of explaining biophilia explains how distinct the feeling is from an abstract environmental ideology. Biophilia is an emotion that, completely outside of logical arguments about the utility of nature, feels upon encountering other living things a sense that something good is taking place.
Biophilia is the opposite emotion of the uncanny valley. It’s the feeling of being at home when surrounded by life, of things being exactly as they ought to be. It’s a feeling that’s literally natural.
