Automating empathy: overview, technologies, criticism

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This chapter explores the means and implications of organisational use of technologies that simulate properties of cognitive empathy. Such systems are already being used in a variety of contexts but, given the increasingly central role of the body in mediated experience, there is a need for critical attention to foreseeable problems and abuses of biometric technologies that profile bodies and their expressions. Providing an overview of what is meant by automated empathy and critical concerns therein, this chapter introduces the technologies, how they are being used, and some vectors for criticism. In outlining ‘automated empathy’, the chapter also clarifies what is often muddled terminology around the use of soft biometrics to interact with human emotion and related intimate states. In addition to technologies and definitions, it details the organisational sectors that use, or are likely to use, automated empathy techniques, paying particular attention to global behemoths Microsoft and Meta. Finally, the chapter details key critical approaches by which automated empathy may be judged, focusing on matters of what the chapter phrases as ‘mental integrity’ and ‘unnatural mediation’.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationHandbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence
PublisherEdward Elgar
Pages656-669
ISBN (print)9781803928555
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 Nov 2023
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