One of the most frightening thing about the theory of basic emotions that forms the foundation of all Emotion AI projects is that it completely fails to include love.
The reason for this oversight is simple: Love requires the context of a relationship of some kind. You can’t just see it in a facial expression, or measure it through someone’s heart rate or skin conductivity. Love is about the way a person feels about someone or something other than themselves.
You have to be a sentient being capable of feeling love yourself to understand what it is. So, no artificial intelligence can possibly grasp love.
Emotion AI companies, when confronted with this quandary, don’t respond by acknowledging that there’s a major flaw with the very concept of their technology. No, instead, they simply pretend that love doesn’t exist.
That’s scary.
It’s even more scary to consider that the digital corporations deploying Emotion AI systems aren’t just independent companies like Affectiva. Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are all developing their own Emotion AI programs.
None of their Emotion AI protocols acknowledge the existence of love.
Love is a complex emotion that comes in many forms. The dominant manifestation of love in most cultures is romantic love, but love between other family members is commonly recognized, too. Friends might be recognized to feel love for each other, but pointedly avoid using the word.
There’s a great deal of tension about feeling the proper kind of love for the proper kind of person. Parents and children are definitely not supposed to feel romantic love for each other. It would also be wrong, though not illegal, for spouses to feel parental love for each other. It’s not uncommon for people to say that they love their pets as if they were children, but parents often scoff at the suggestion that the two kinds of love are the same.
Particular kinds of love come with specific sets of expectations, but these expectations are different from culture to culture. The emotion of love is something most people feel, but the rules of how love is supposed to be outwardly expressed are far from universal.
Degrees of love are also essential to understand, but are the source of frequent confusion. We all know what the phrase, “I love you, but not in that way” means in an abstract way, but in a specific use of this phrase, it’s often not clear at all what is being said. We can get the general gist that our perceptions of love don’t match, but still ask in frustration, “In what way don’t you love me, exactly, and how do you love me, then?” Couples can be married for years, only to discover that their modes of love have never truly been in accord.
It’s not really ironic that Frank Sinatra could sing love songs for years, and then still plausibly get up on stage and sing “What is this thing called love?” Love is the sort of emotion that, just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, will sneak up on you and surprise you with a new manifestation that leaves you reeling. Being in love and still not really getting what love is, that’s what love is all about.
Confusing the matter is the common use of the word “love” to refer to a much milder emotion, a kind of fervent enthusiasm. When someone says, “I love lasagna,” their face may light up with signs of special significance, but we never imagine that the feeling is reciprocal.
