The following is a conversation with Rosalind Picard.

She's a professor at MIT, director of the effective computing research group at the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of 2 companies, Affectiva and Empatica.

Over 2 decades ago, she launched the field of effective computing with her book of the same name.

This book described the importance of emotion in artificial and natural intelligence, the vital role of emotional communication has to the relationship between people in general and human robot interaction.

I really enjoy talking with Roz over so many topics including emotion, ethics, privacy, wearable computing, and her recent research in epilepsy, and even love and meaning.

This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.

If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D.

And now, here's my conversation with Rosalind Picard.

More than 20 years ago, you've coined the term effective computing and led a lot of research in this area since then.

As I understand, the goal is to make the machine detect and interpret the emotional state of a human being and adapt the behavior of the machine based on the emotional state.

So how is your understanding of the problem space defined by affective computing changed in the past 24 years?

So it's the scope, the applications, the challenges, what's involved, How has that evolved over the years?

Yeah, actually, originally when I defined the term affective computing, it was a bit broader than just recognizing and responding intelligently to human emotion.

Although those are probably the 2 pieces that we've worked on the hardest.

The original concept also encompassed machines that would have mechanisms that functioned like human emotion does inside them.

It would be any computing that relates to arises from or deliberately influences human emotion.

So the human computer interaction part is the part that people tend to see.

Like if I'm really ticked off at my computer and I'm scowling at it and I'm cursing at it and it just keeps acting smiling and happy like that little paperclip used to do, dancing, winking.

That kind of thing just makes you even more frustrated.

And I thought, that stupid thing needs to see my affect.

And if it's gonna be intelligent, which Microsoft researchers had worked really hard on.

It actually has some of the most sophisticated AI in it at the time.

And we can send it very different signals.

So by the way, just a quick interruption, the CLPI, maybe it's in Word 95 and 98, I don't remember when it was born, but many people, do you find yourself with that reference that people recognize what you're talking about still to this point?

I don't expect the newest students to these days, but I've mentioned it to a lot of audiences, like how many of you know this Clippy thing?

And still the majority of people seem to know it.

So Clippy kind of looks at maybe natural language processing, what you were typing, and tries to help you complete, I think, I don't even remember what Clippy was, except annoying.

Yeah, it tried, some people actually liked it.

They felt like there's a, there's an element.

Somebody was there and we're in it together and they were annoying, it's like a puppy that just doesn't get it.

And in fact they could have done it smarter like a puppy.

If they had done, like if when you yelled at it or cursed at it, if it had put its little ears back and its tail down and shirked off, probably people would have wanted it back, right?

But instead, when you yelled at it, what did it do?

If somebody comes to my office and I yell at them, they start smiling, winking, and dancing, I'm like, I never want to see you again.

So Bill Gates got a standing ovation when he said it was going away, because people were so ticked.

It was so emotionally unintelligent, right?

It was intelligent about whether you were writing a letter or what kind of help you needed for that context.

It was completely unintelligent about, hey, if you're annoying your customer, don't smile in their face when you do it.

So that kind of mismatch was something the developers just didn't think about.

And intelligence at the time was really all about math and language and chess and games, problems that could be pretty well-defined.

Social-emotional interaction is much more complex than chess or Go or any of the games that people are trying to solve.

And in order to understand that required skills that most people in computer science actually were lacking personally.

Have things gotten better since the work, since the message, since you've really launched a field with a lot of research work in this space?

I still find as a person like yourself, who's deeply passionate about human beings, and yet I'm in computer science, there still seems to be a lack of, sorry to say, empathy in us computer scientists.

Let's just say there's a lot more variety among computer scientists these days.

Computer scientists are a much more diverse group today than they were 25 years ago, and that's good.

We need all kinds of people to become computer scientists so that computer science reflects more what society needs.

And there's brilliance among every personality type, so it need not be limited to people who prefer computers to other people.

Your view of how difficult it is to recognize emotion or to create a deeply emotionally intelligent interaction, has it gotten easier or harder as you've explored it further?

And how far away are we from cracking this, if you think of the Turing test solving the intelligence, looking at the Turing test for emotional intelligence?

I think it is as difficult as I thought it was gonna be.

I think my prediction of its difficulty is spot on.

I think the time estimates are always hard because they're always a function of society's love and hate of a particular topic.

If society gets excited and you get hundreds of, and you get thousands of researchers working on it for a certain application, that application gets solved really quickly.

The general intelligence, the computer's complete lack of ability to have awareness of what it's doing, The fact that it's not conscious, the fact that there's no signs of it becoming conscious, the fact that it doesn't read between the lines, those kinds of things that we have to teach it explicitly, what other people pick up implicitly, We don't see that changing yet.

There aren't breakthroughs yet that lead us to believe that that's going to go any faster, which means that it's still going to be kind of stuck with a lot of limitations where it's probably only going to do the right thing in very limited, narrow, pre-specified contexts where we can prescribe pretty much what's going to happen there.

So I don't see the, It's hard to predict a date because when people don't work on it, it's infinite.

When everybody works on it, you get a nice piece of it well-solved in a short amount of time.

I actually think there's a more important issue right now than the difficulty of it.

And that's causing some of us to put the brakes on a little bit.

Usually we're all just like step on the gas, let's go faster.

This is causing us to pull back and put the brakes on.

And that's the way that some of this technology is being used in places like China right now.

And that worries me so deeply that it's causing me to pull back myself on a lot of the things that we could be doing and try to get the community to think a little bit more about, okay, if we're gonna go forward with that, how can we do it in a way that puts in place safeguards that protects people?

So the technology we're referring to is just when a computer senses the human being, like the human face.

And so what, there's a lot of exciting things there, like forming a deep connection with a human being, so what are your worries how that could go wrong?

Is it in terms of other kinds of more subtle things.

So here in the US, if I'm watching a video of say a political leader, and in the US we're quite free as we all know to even criticize the president of the United States, right?

But in China, what happens if you criticize the leader of the government, right?

And so people are very careful not to do that.

However, what happens if you're simply watching a video and you make a facial expression that shows a little bit of skepticism, right?

Well, and, you know, here we're completely free to do that.

In fact, we're free to fly off the handle and say anything we want, usually.

I mean, there are some restrictions, you know, when the athlete does this as part of the national broadcast maybe the teams get a little unhappy about picking that forum to do it, right?

We have these freedoms, and in places that don't have those freedoms, what if our technology can read your underlying affective state?

What if our technology can read it even non-contact?

What if our technology can read it without your prior consent?

And here in the US, in my first company, we started Affectiva.

We have worked super hard to turn away money and opportunities that try to read people's affect without their prior informed consent.

And even the software that is licensable, You have to sign things saying you will only use it in certain ways, which essentially is get people's buy-in, right?

Don't do this without people agreeing to it.

There are other countries where they're not interested in people's buy-in.

And if you don't like it, you better not scowl in the direction of any censors.

So 1, let me just comment on a small tangent.

Do you know with the idea of adversarial examples and deep fakes and so on.

What you bring up is actually, in that 1 sense, deep fakes provide a comforting protection that you can no longer really trust that the video of your face was legitimate, and therefore you always have an escape clause if a government is trying, if a stable, balanced, ethical government is trying to accuse you of something, at least you have protection.

You can say it was fake news, as is a popular term now.

We know how to go into the video and see, for example, your heart rate and respiration, and whether or not they've been tampered with.

And we also can put like fake heart rate and respiration

We decided we needed to do that after we developed a way to extract it, we decided we also needed a way to jam it.

And so the fact that we took time to do that other step too, that was time that I wasn't spending making the machine more affectively intelligent.

And there's a choice in how we spend our time, which is now being swayed a little bit less by this goal and a little bit more like by concern about what's happening in society and what kind of future do we want to build.

And as we step back and say, okay, we don't just build AI to build AI to make Elon Musk more money or to make Amazon Jeff Bezos more money.

It used to be, it was driven by researchers in academia to get papers published and to make a career for themselves and to do something cool, right?

Now we realize that this is enabling rich people to get vastly richer.

And is that the kind of future that we want?

Maybe we want to think about, maybe we want to rethink AI.

Maybe we want to rethink the problems in society that are causing the greatest inequity and rethink how to build AI that's not about a general intelligence, but that's about extending the intelligence and capability of the have-nots so that we close these gaps in society.

Do you hope that kind of stepping on the brake happens organically?

Because I think still majority of the force behind AI is the desire to publish papers, is to make money without thinking about the why.

I prefer the, you know, they talk about the carrot versus the stick.

I definitely prefer the carrot to the stick.

And, you know, in our free world, we, there's only so much stick, right?

I generally think less regulation is better.

That said, even though my position is classically carrot, no stick, no regulation, I think we do need some regulations in this space.

I do think we need regulations around protecting people with their data, that you own your data, not Amazon, not Google.

I would like to see people own their own data.

I would also like to see the regulations that we have right now around lie detection being extended to emotion recognition in general.

That right now you can't use a lie detector on an employee when you're, on a candidate when you're interviewing them for a job.

I think similarly we need to put in place protection around reading people's emotions without their consent and in certain cases like characterizing them for a job and other opportunities.

So I also think that when we're reading emotion that's predictive around mental health, that that should, even though it's not medical data, that that should get the kinds of protections that our medical data gets.

What most people don't know yet is right now with your smartphone use, and if you're wearing a sensor and you wanna learn about your stress and your sleep and your physical activity and how much you're using your phone and your social interaction, all of that non-medical data, when we put it together with machine learning, now called AI, even though the founders of AI wouldn't have called it that, that capability can not only tell that you're calm right now or that you're getting a little stressed, but it can also predict how you're likely to be tomorrow, if you're likely to be sick or healthy, happy or sad, stressed or calm.

Especially when you're tracking data over time.

Especially when we're tracking a week of your data or more.

Do you have an optimism towards, you know, a lot of people on our phones are worried about this camera that's looking at us.

For the most part, on balance, do you, are you optimistic about the benefits that can be brought from that camera that's looking at billions of us, or should we be more worried?

I think we should be a little bit more worried about who's looking at us and listening to us.

The device sitting on your countertop in your kitchen, whether it's Alexa or Google Home or Apple, Siri, these devices want to listen while they say ostensibly to help us.

And I think there are great people in these companies who do want to help people.

I'm a user of products from all of these companies.

I'm naming all the A companies, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon.

And What if China were to buy them, right?

And suddenly all of that data were not part of free America, but all of that data were part of somebody who just wants to take over the world and you submit to them.

And guess what happens if you so much as smirk the wrong way when they say something that you don't like, well, they have re-education camps, right?

By the way, they have a surplus of organs for people who have surgery these days.

They don't have an organ donation problem because they take your blood and they know you're a match.

And the doctors are on record of taking organs from people who are perfectly healthy and not prisoners.

They're just simply not the favored ones of the government.

And you know, that's a pretty freaky evil society.

I can certainly connect to the worry that you're expressing.

At the same time, probably both you and I, and you very much so, You know, there's an exciting possibility that you can have a deep connection with a machine.

Those of us, I've admitted students who say that they, you know, when you list like, who do you most wish you could have lunch with or dinner with, right?

And they'll write like, I don't like people.

And 1 of them said to me once when I had this party at my house, I want you to know, this is my only social event of the year, my 1 social event of the year.

Like, okay, now this is a brilliant machine learning person, right?

And we need that kind of brilliance in machine learning.

And I love that computer science welcomes people who love people and people who are very awkward around people.

I love that this is a field that anybody could join.

And you don't need to be a social person.

I'm not trying to force people who don't like people to suddenly become social.

At the same time, if most of the people building the AIs of the future are the kind of people who don't like people, we've got a little bit of a problem.

So don't you think a large percentage of the world can, you know, there's loneliness.

a huge problem with loneliness and it's growing.

If you're lonely, you're part of a big and growing group.

But do you think there's, you talked about some worry, but do you think there's an exciting possibility that something like Alexa and these kinds of tools can alleviate that loneliness in a way that other humans can't?

I mean, a great book can kind of alleviate loneliness, because you just get sucked into this amazing story and you can't wait to go spend time with that character.

And they're not a human character, there is a human behind it.

But yeah, it can be an incredibly delightful way to pass the hours.

And it can meet needs even, you know, I don't read those trashy romance books, but somebody does, right?

Well, probably some of that feeling of being there, right?

Being there in that social moment, that romantic moment, or connecting with somebody.

I've had a similar experience reading some science fiction books, right?

Orson Scott Card, you know, just amazing writing in Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, terrible title, but those kind of books that pull you into a character and you feel like you're, you feel very social, it's very connected, even though it's not responding to you.

And a computer, of course, can respond to you.

You can have a very deep connection, much more than the movie Her, you know, plays up, right?

I mean, movie Her is already a pretty deep connection, right?

It's just, you know, but I mean, like, there can be a real interaction where the character can learn and you can learn.

You could imagine it not just being you and 1 character, you can imagine a group of characters, you can imagine a group of people and characters, human and AI connecting, where maybe a few people can't sort of be friends with everybody, but the few people and their AIs can befriend more people.

There can be an extended human intelligence in there where each human can connect with more people that way.

But it's still very limited, but there are just, what I mean is there are many more possibilities than what's in that movie.

So when you express a really serious concern about privacy, about how governments can misuse the information, and there's the possibility of this connection.

For the most part, as far as I'm aware, they ignore your emotion.

They ignore even the context or the existence of you, the intricate, beautiful, complex aspects of who you are, except maybe aspects of your voice that help it recognize for speech recognition.

Do you think they should move towards trying to understand your emotion?

All of these companies are very interested in understanding human emotion.

More people are telling Siri every day they want to kill themselves.

Apple wants to know the difference between if a person is really suicidal versus if a person is just kind of fooling around with Siri, right?

The tone of voice and what surrounds those words is pivotal to understand if they should respond in a very serious way, bring help to that person, or if they should kind of jokingly tease back, you know, ah, you just want to, you know, sell me for something else, right?

Like, like, how do you respond when somebody says that?

Well, you do want to err on the side of being careful and taking it seriously.

People want to know if the person is happy or stressed in part, Well, so let me give you an altruistic reason and a business profit motivated reason.

And there are people and companies that operate on both principles.

The altruistic people really care about their customers and really care about helping you feel a little better at the end of the day.

And it would just make those people happy if they knew that they made your life better.

If you came home stressed and after talking with their product, you felt better.

There are other people who maybe have studied the way affect affects decision making and prices people pay, and they know, I don't know if I should tell you, like the work of Jen Lerner on heart strings and purse strings, if we manipulate you into a slightly sadder mood, you'll pay more.

You'll pay more to change your situation.

You'll pay more for something you don't even need to make yourself feel better.

So, you know, if they sound a little sad, maybe I don't want to cheer them up.

Maybe first I want to help them get something.

Little shopping therapy, right, that helps them.

Which is really difficult for a company that's primarily funded on advertisement.

Or Amazon that's primarily funded on you buying things from their store.

So I think we should be, you know, maybe we need regulation in the future to put a little bit of a wall between these agents that have access to our emotion and agents that wanna sell us stuff.

Maybe there needs to be a little bit more of a firewall in between those.

So maybe digging in a little bit on the interaction with Alexa.

You mentioned, of course, a really serious concern about like recognizing emotion if somebody is speaking of suicide or depression and so on.

But what about the actual interaction itself?

Do you think, so if I, you know, you mentioned Clippy being annoying.

What is the objective function we're trying to optimize?

Is it minimize annoyingness or maximize happiness?

But if we look at human to human relations, I think that push and pull, the tension, the dance, you know, the annoying, the flaws, that's what makes it fun.

So is there a room for, what is the object

I see my sons and 1 of them wants to provoke the other to be upset, and that's fun.

And it's actually healthy to learn where your limits are, to learn how to self-regulate.

You can imagine a game where it's trying to make you mad and you're trying to show self-control.

And so if we're doing a AI human interaction that's helping build resilience and self-control, whether it's to learn how to not be a bully or how to turn the other cheek or how to deal with an abusive person in your life, then you might need an AI that pushes your buttons, right?

But in general, do you want an AI that pushes your buttons?

I want 1 that's respectful, that is there to serve me, and that is there to extend my ability to do things.

I'm not looking for a rival, I'm looking for a helper.

And that's the kind of AI I'd put my money on.

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Rosalind Picard: Affective Computing, Emotion, Privacy, and Health | Lex Fridman Podcast #24