I am a rarity in the tech world: A woman in charge—a brown-skinned computer scientist at that—in a field that is still very male and very white. I was raised in the Middle East in a male-dominated culture that is still figuring out the role of women in a world that is changing with breathtaking speed. In both these cultures—tech and the Muslim Middle East—women have been excluded or restricted from positions of power. I’ve had to learn how to maneuver both cultures to achieve what I have.
I am who I am because I was raised by a particular set of parents, both modern and conservative; forward-thinking and yet locked in tradition. I am a Muslim, and I feel I am stronger and more centered for it; I adhere to the values of my religion even if I am not as dutiful as I once was. And I am a new American and am thriving on the energy, vitality, and entrepreneurial spirit of this great country.
I offer a perspective on growing up in my world, in a Middle East that you rarely hear about in the West. I want to introduce you to my family and share some of our experiences. After all, bridging the divide between people is how we gain empathy, and that is how we build strong, emotionally intact people and a strong, emotionally intact world. That is at the core of what I do, whether in the real world or the cyber one.
I am also passionate that people understand what AI is, and how it’s going to impact their lives. The world, your world, is about to change. And as someone who has been at the forefront of this movement, I want to take you behind the scenes and show you how AI is built, how this technology will unfold, and, more important, how to put it to the best use. AI is no longer the flying car of some far-off future: AI is becoming mainstream. It is taking on roles that were traditionally done by humans, like driving our cars, helping us manage chronic health conditions, and even reviewing your next job application. Given how AI is becoming ubiquitous, and the potential impact it has on all of our lives, it’s critical that we as a society take an active role in how this AI is designed, developed, and deployed.
With our reliance on our computers today, Emotion AI is absolutely essential. Right now, we are pushing technology to the edge, asking it to perform tasks it was never meant to address. Computers, after all, were originally designed to compute (hence the name), to crunch numbers faster and more accurately than would be humanly possible.
In this age of immersive technology, computers are being called upon to do far more than basic number crunching. Mobile technology (our smartphones, tablets, smartwatches) has ushered in a whole new world, one of presidential tweets, Facebook, Snapchat, crowdsourcing, digital banking, online shopping, and virtual assistants to perform everything from booking hotels to making stock trades to “hooking up.” With devices such as Fitbit, Siri, and Alexa, we are now all connected, all the time, wherever we are.
As computers grew smaller, sleeker, more powerful (and more truly mobile), we began to use them for everything in our lives, including things for which the absence of EQ matters a great deal.
For many of us, computers have become the primary way we communicate with one another. We may all be connected all the time, wherever we are, but it doesn’t mean we are actually communicating or connecting with one another in a meaningful way. We evolved over millennia to communicate face-to-face. Words alone do not convey the true meaning of a message. The vast majority of human-to-human communication is transmitted through our nonverbal signals, facial expressions, and fluctuations in voice, gesture, and body language. All of this is lost when we communicate online.
Of all our nonverbal cues, I believe the human face is our most powerful conveyer of emotion. Our faces display the full spectrum of our emotions and other mental states, from enjoyment, surprise, and fear to curiosity, boredom, love, and anger. That’s why I focused my work on teaching computers how to read faces, the way humans do, so they could recognize and respond to our facial expressions, from smiles to scowls.
Decoding nonverbal cues, understanding the nuance of emotion by observing one another in real time, is something human beings do from the first moments of life. And we continue to develop this skill as we mature and are exposed to more and more people and expressions. This is how we gain wisdom; this is how we learn to be empathetic. It is an essential component of EQ.
As part of my research, I have worked closely with young adults on the autism spectrum, a complex neurological condition characterized by, among other things, difficulty recognizing, processing, and responding to the emotional cues of others. In fact, many have an aversion to making eye contact or even to looking someone directly in the face, so they miss most facial expressions. This can have dire implications for their ability to communicate with others, participate in family life, learn at school, retain a job, or sustain a long-term relationship.
Early in my work, I realized that when it comes to recognizing and interpreting feelings, computers are functionally autistic: They can’t see or process emotion “data” or respond to emotion cues. By extension, I believe that when we interact in the emotion-blind cyber world, we are all rendered functionally autistic.
When you speak with someone face-to-face, you get immediate feedback by watching the other person’s facial expressions and body gestures and listening to the tone of their voice when they respond to your words. If you are “neurotypical” (that is, not autistic), you are hardwired to process these emotion cues. That’s how you discern the impact of your words on another person. We observe each other and react accordingly.
When we communicate via the cyber world, however, we miss the natural feedback system that enables us to modulate our behavior based on the reactions of others. The critical nonverbal portion of our communication is lost in cyberspace.
Our social media platforms, the way so many of us connect with one another, can be dehumanizing. Without any real emotional connection, it’s easy to forget that we are talking to and about other human beings, and the absence of real-time social interaction twists and distorts our behavior. When it comes to the digital world, our computers have trained us to behave as if we lived in a world dominated by autism, where none of us can read one another’s emotional cues.
I’m not suggesting that cruelty and intolerance didn’t exist before social media or that the world was a kinder and better place. Throughout human history, there have been horrific displays of empathy deficit; genocide, mass killings, and slavery are stains on our past (and still plague us today). What’s different today though is that with our 24/7 online world, the language of intolerance is quite literally in our faces, on our devices, all the time.
I have staked my career on the belief that Emotion AI is part of the cure. It can help to strengthen emotional intelligence in the digital world (online, in our texts and emails, on Facebook or Snapchat posts) and begin to repair the damage caused by more than two decades of our conducting a significant part of our lives and relationships, for the first time in human history, in an emotion-free zone.
When I began this journey more than two decades ago, there was no Skype, FaceTime, or video conference; today all these tools are readily available. A virtual “face-to-face” interaction is an improvement over an emotion blind one, but the reality is that most communications are still not visual. The primary form of communication is texting—according to industry sources, the number of texts sent annually is in the trillions. For the most part, the primary way we communicate has zero EQ.