In the rapidly evolving realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital technologies, a pressing issue confronts academic scholars and social scientists—the profound consequences of AI adoption within the intricate structures of society. Despite its pervasive influence, this critical topic remains largely unexplored in academic circles, leaving a significant knowledge gap regarding how AI reshapes human interactions, institutions, and the fabric of our digital society. AI and Emotions in Digital Society, edited by Adrian Scribano and Maximiliano E Korstanje, emerges as the timely and compelling solution to bridge this divide. In this transformative book, readers embark on an intellectual journey exploring the intricate interplay between society, technology, and emotions. Drawing together high-quality chapters from diverse disciplines and cultural backgrounds, the book fosters critical discussions that delve into the philosophical quandaries underpinning AI's influence, especially within the context of our ever-changing world. By adopting a balanced perspective that acknowledges both risks and opportunities, the book equips postgraduate students, professionals, policymakers, AI analysts, and social scientists with the tools to comprehend the far-reaching effects of AI on human behavior, institutions, and democratic processes. As readers engage with this thought-provoking content, they gain profound insights into how AI impacts various sectors, including education, travel, literature, politics, and cyber-security. AI and Emotions in Digital Society serves as an indispensable resource for navigating the ongoing AI revolution, inspiring informed decision-making, and fostering critical dialogue. By empowering readers to grasp the complexities of AI's role in a new cosmopolitan capitalism, the book opens possibilities for a future where humanity and technology harmoniously coexist, shaping the course of our digitally interconnected society.

What happens when media technologies are able to interpret our feelings, emotions, moods, and intentions? In this cutting edge new book, Andrew McStay explores that very question and argues that these abilities result in a form of technological empathy. Offering a balanced and incisive overview of the issues raised by ‘Emotional AI’, this book: Provides a clear account of the social benefits and drawbacks of new media trends and technologies such as emoji, wearables and chatbots Demonstrates through empirical research how ‘empathic media’ have been developed and introduced both by start-ups and global tech corporations such as Facebook Helps readers understand the potential implications on everyday life and social relations through examples such as video-gaming, facial coding, virtual reality and cities Calls for a more critical approach to the rollout of emotional AI in public and private spheres Combining established theory with original analysis, this book will change the way students view, use and interact with new technologies. It should be required reading for students and researchers in media, communications, the social sciences and beyond.

Emotion in the Digital Age examines how emotion is understood, researched and experienced in relation to practices of digitisation and datafication said to constitute a digital age. The overarching concern of the book is with how emotion operates in, through, and with digital technologies. The digital landscape is vast, and as such, the authors focus on four key areas of digital practice: artificial intelligence, social media, mental health, and surveillance. Interrogating each area shows how emotion is commodified, symbolised, shared and experienced, and as such operates in multiple dimensions. This includes tracing the emotional impact of early mass media (e.g. cinema) through to efforts to programme AI agents with skills in emotional communication (e.g. mental health chatbots). This timely study offers theoretical, empirical and practical insight regarding the ways that digitisation is changing knowledge and experience of emotion and affective life. Crucially, this involves both the multiple versions of digital technologies designed to engage with emotion (e.g. emotional-AI) through to the broader emotional impact of living in digitally saturated environments. The authors argue that this constitutes a psycho-social way of being in which digital technologies and emotion operate as key dimensions of the ways we simultaneously relate to ourselves as individual subjects and to others as part of collectives. As such, Emotion in the Digital Age will prove important reading for students and researchers in emotion studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and related fields.

For Readers of Ray Kurzweil and Michio Kaku, a New Look at the Cutting Edge of Artificial Intelligence Imagine a robotic stuffed animal that can read and respond to a child’s emotional state, a commercial that can recognize and change based on a customer’s facial expression, or a company that can actually create feelings as though a person were experiencing them naturally. Heart of the Machine explores the next giant step in the relationship between humans and technology: the ability of computers to recognize, respond to, and even replicate emotions. Computers have long been integral to our lives, and their advances continue at an exponential rate. Many believe that artificial intelligence equal or superior to human intelligence will happen in the not-too-distance future; some even think machine consciousness will follow. Futurist Richard Yonck argues that emotion, the first, most basic, and most natural form of communication, is at the heart of how we will soon work with and use computers. Instilling emotions into computers is the next leap in our centuries-old obsession with creating machines that replicate humans. But for every benefit this progress may bring to our lives, there is a possible pitfall. Emotion recognition could lead to advanced surveillance, and the same technology that can manipulate our feelings could become a method of mass control. And, as shown in movies like Her and Ex Machina, our society already holds a deep-seated anxiety about what might happen if machines could actually feel and break free from our control. Heart of the Machine is an exploration of the new and inevitable ways in which mankind and technology will interact. The paperback edition has a new foreword by Rana el Kaliouby, PhD, a pioneer in artificial emotional intelligence, as well as the cofounder and CEO of Affectiva, the acclaimed AI startup spun off from the MIT Media Lab.

In 1950, Alan Turing, the British mathematician, cryptographer, and computer pioneer, looked to the future: now that the conceptual and technical parameters for electronic brains had been established, what kind of intelligence could be built? Should machine intelligence mimic the abstract thinking of a chess player or should it be more like the developing mind of a child? Should an intelligent agent only think, or should it also learn, feel, and grow? Affect and Artificial Intelligence is the first in-depth analysis of affect and intersubjectivity in the computational sciences. Elizabeth Wilson makes use of archival and unpublished material from the early years of AI (1945–70) until the present to show that early researchers were more engaged with questions of emotion than many commentators have assumed. She documents how affectivity was managed in the canonical works of Walter Pitts in the 1940s and Turing in the 1950s, in projects from the 1960s that injected artificial agents into psychotherapeutic encounters, in chess-playing machines from the 1940s to the present, and in the Kismet (sociable robotics) project at MIT in the 1990s.

This book presents an introduction to strategies for qualitative digital social research on emotions in a digital world. The book emphasizes the connections that exist between emotional ecologies, emotions as texts, and the virtual / mobile / digital world that brings us closer to a hermeneutics of the practices of feeling. In the context of ‘Society 4.0’, the book explores: Changes in the organization of daily life and work in virtual, mobile and digital environments. The impact of apps and social networks on sensations, emotions and sensibilities. Necessary changes in social research to employ the power of these apps and networks for social enquiry. As such, this book shares a set of social inquiry practices developed and applied to capture and understand emotions today. It should be considered as a first step in a long journey of exploring the close connections between sensibilities, emotions, and social research methodology. The book will appeal to students and instructors of emotion studies from across the social sciences, including sociology, psychology, organization studies, ethnography, history, and political science.

As machines are trained to “think,” many tasks that previously required human intelligence are becoming automated through artificial intelligence. However, it is more difficult to automate emotional intelligence, and this is where the human worker’s competitive advantage over machines currently lies. This book explores the impact of AI on everyday life, looking into workers’ adaptation to these changes, the ways in which managers can change the nature of jobs in light of AI developments, and the potential for humans and AI to continue working together. The book argues that AI is rapidly assuming a larger share of thinking tasks, leaving human intelligence to focus on feeling. The result is the “Feeling Economy,” in which both employees and consumers emphasize feeling to an unprecedented extent, with thinking tasks largely delegated to AI. The book shows both theoretical and empirical evidence that this shift is well underway. Further, it explores the effect of the Feeling Economy on our everyday lives in the areas such as shopping, politics, and education. Specifically, it argues that in this new economy, through empathy and people skills, women may gain an unprecedented degree of power and influence. This book will appeal to readers across disciplines interested in understanding the impact of AI on business and our daily lives. It represents a bold, potentially controversial attempt to gauge the direction in which society is heading.