TY - CHAP

T1 - Automating empathy: overview, technologies, criticism

AU - McStay, Andrew

AU - Bakir, Vian

PY - 2023/11/14

Y1 - 2023/11/14

N2 - 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’.

AB - 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’.

U2 - 10.4337/9781803928562.00067

DO - 10.4337/9781803928562.00067

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9781803928555

SP - 656

EP - 669

BT - Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence

PB - Edward Elgar

ER -