How will AI shape us?

After exploring how AI perceives identity in my "Identity Crisis"
intervention, I then wanted to explore how AI can modify our identity and behavior. In a world where we increasingly rely on AI to perform tasks that we know how to do but no longer want to do, how will our brains develop and how will our behaviors change if we no longer perform tasks that are part of our daily lives today? When it comes to bringing new drugs to market, a lot of tests are done to understand the potential side effects. But for AI, the first company that managed to bring it to market did so without prior testing. So I wanted to understand how the human brain will adapt in 200 years if AI becomes an integral part of our lives, which is why I created Emotional Talks..

Emotional Talks: How does AI make you feel?

With Emotional Talks, I wanted to explore how people react to the integration of AI in their conversations. What if an emotion recognition tool was informing your interlocutor of how you feel while talking to them? How would your behaviour change? How would it make you feel?

I built an AI recognition system through computer vision thanks to the resources provided in the extended intelligences seminar. The AI model was based on DeepFace, an open-source deep learning facial recognition system created by a research group at Facebook. It identifies human faces and attributes in digital images. The model also uses OpenCV which is a large open source library for computer vision, machine learning and image processing and now plays a major role in real-time operations used in today's AI systems.

We set-up two screens with cameras during the Design Dialogues and asked people to have a conversation through the screens, so that they would see the emotions of their interlocutor while talking to them. Their conversation was guided by conversation starters that we provided.

Reflections

During the intervention, some participants said that they trusted the AI’s interpretation of their interlocutor’s emotion more than their own. This is very interesting as it shows how we’ve been conditioned to trust machines more than ourselves, probably due to their consistent and reliable performance, predictable behavior, and lack of personal motivations.

This made me reflect on the long term impacts of such an approach to machines and AI specifically, in a society where our reliance on AI will grow exponentially. As we increasingly depend on AI to work and think, how will it affect our brains and behaviours in the long-term?

Will it afford more time to develop new skills, or will it decrease our intellectual potential? I now want to investigate how this phenomenon will affect the human condition and what will characterise the “homo-digitalis” of the future.