Introduction
Emotion Blind
A view of human nature that ignores the power of emotions is sadly shortsighted.
—DANIEL GOLEMAN, PHD, author, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
In the summer of 2017, Jamel Dunn, a thirty-one-year-old disabled man from Central Florida, realized that he had waded too far out into a pond. He shouted to a group of teenagers hanging out on shore for help, but they were unresponsive; they refused to come to his aid. As the father of two flailed in the water and pleaded for someone to help him, the teenagers actually jeered and taunted him, calling him a “cripple” and yelling, “You’re gonna die.” They did not race into the water to try to save him. Nor did they use their cellphones to call 911. They did use their cellphones, however, to record the event. When, after a few minutes, Dunn disappeared beneath the surface, one of them observed, “He just died,” and they all laughed.
How do we know all this? The teens not only recorded the incident on their smartphones but also posted the video online, treating the real-life drama that had unfolded before them as a bit of edgy shock video. Otherwise, this summer tragedy of 2017 in Cocoa, Florida, a small town near Orlando, would likely have passed unnoticed. It certainly would never have been picked up by media worldwide. And I would never have heard about it in the Boston suburb where I live. Dunn’s sister learned of the video and notified the police, who brought the teenagers into the station for questioning. A police officer told CNN that the teens showed no remorse; in fact, they showed very little emotion at all. “I’ve been doing this a long time, probably twenty years or more…I was horrified. My jaw dropped,” she said.
Ultimately, the teens weren’t charged with any crime: They were not liable under Florida law to provide emergency assistance or even to report the drowning. Nevertheless, their callousness, their casual cruelty, was horrifying. But that alone doesn’t explain why this particular incident went viral. I believe that the lack of basic humanity in these teens hit a deep societal nerve, exposing an ugly truth about the world we now live in. Every day, we encounter people who display a similarly shocking lack of empathy, not to mention basic civility.
It is commonplace on social media and in politics, entertainment, and popular culture to see callous, hateful language and actions that even a couple of years ago would have been considered shocking, disgraceful, and disqualifying. As a newly minted American citizen born in Egypt and a Muslim woman who immigrated to the United States with her two children at a time when political leaders were calling for Muslim bans and border walls to keep immigrants out, I am particularly aware of the insensitive, at times vicious, voices in the cyber world. But, in truth, everyone is fair game.
It is not off-limits to troll survivors of gun violence, like the students of Parkland, who advocate for saner gun laws; to shame victims of sexual abuse; to post racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant rants; or to ridicule people whose only sin is that they disagree with you. This is happening in our communities, workplaces, and even on our college campuses. Today, such behaviors are dismissed with a shrug. They can even get you tens of millions of followers and a prime-time spot on a cable TV network—or send you to the White House.
What happened in Florida is representative of a problem endemic to our society. Some social scientists call it an “empathy crisis.” It is the inability to put yourself in another’s shoes and feel compassion, sympathy, and kinship for another human being. This stunning lack of concern for our fellow citizens permeates and festers in the cyber world, especially on social media, and is spilling over into the real world.
We, as a society, are in increasingly dangerous territory—we are at risk of undermining the very traits that make us human in the first place.
More than two decades ago, journalist Daniel Goleman wrote about the importance of empathy in his bestselling book Emotional Intelligence. When he argued that genuine intelligence is a mixture of IQ and what we’ve come to call EQ, or emotional intelligence, he changed our thinking about what makes someone truly intelligent. EQ is the ability to understand and control our emotions and read and respond appropriately to the emotional states of others. EQ, rather than IQ, is the determining factor predicting success in business, personal relationships, and even our health outcomes.
Obviously, you can’t experience emotional intelligence without feeling, without emotion. But when we are in cyberspace, “feelings” don’t come into play because our computers can’t see or sense them: When we enter the virtual world, we leave our EQ behind.
Inadvertently, we have plunged ourselves headfirst into a world that neither recognizes emotion nor allows us to express emotion to one another, a world that short-circuits an essential dimension of human intelligence. And today, we are suffering the consequences of our emotion-blind interactions.
Computers are “smart” in that they were designed with an abundance of cognitive intelligence, or IQ. But they are totally lacking in EQ. Traditional computers are emotion blind: They don’t recognize or respond to emotion at all. Around twenty years ago, a handful of computer scientists—I was one of them—recognized that as computers became more deeply embedded in our lives, we would need them to have more than computational smarts; we’d need them to have people smarts. Without this, we run the risk that our dependence on our “smart” technology will siphon off the very intelligence and capabilities that distinguish human beings from our machines. If we continue on this path of emotion blind technology, we run the risk of losing our social skills in the real world. We will forget how to be compassionate and empathetic to one another.
I am cofounder and CEO of a Boston-based artificial intelligence company, a pioneer in Emotion AI, a branch of computer science dedicated to bringing emotional intelligence to the digital world. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the science of training computers to think and reason like human beings. Emotion AI is focused on training computers to recognize, quantify, and respond to human emotion, something that traditional computers were not built to do. My goal is not to build emotive computers, but to enable human beings to retain our humanity when we are in the cyber world. This book—my life—is about the quest to humanize technology before it dehumanizes us.
In striving to become the “expert” I needed to be in human emotion in order to teach machines about emotion, I found myself turning the spotlight on my own emotional life. This was an even more daunting process than writing code for computers; it forced me to confront my own reticence to share my innermost feelings, indeed, my reluctance to recognize and act on my own feelings. Ultimately, decoding myself—learning to express my own emotions and act on them—was the biggest challenge of all. Expert as I have become on the subject, I feel that I am very much a work in progress myself.
To me, my work and my personal story are inseparable; each flows into the other. And so this book is a chronicle of that dual journey— the quest to equip machines with EQ and, in the process, unlock my own EQ.