Artificial intelligence or emotional competence?

There is great anticipation for Spike Jonze’s new film, ‘Her’, which will be released in cinemas in March 2014.
It is the story of a man who falls in love with a new operating system.

The film seems to comment on modern society and our increasingly intimate and obsessive relationship with technology.
We go to bed with our smart phones, we wear computers to work, we chat all the time with people who are thousands of kilometres away, when perhaps at that moment we have our best friend in front of us.
No wonder we will come to fall in love with more and more intelligent machines with which we spend most of our time. I am convinced that some people are already in love with their smart phones.

Many of the psychologists, sociologists and experts who study artificial intelligence and the impact it will have on our relationships are no longer questioning whether it will happen but wondering when it will happen.
The relationship that takes place between machine and human is one without non-verbal interactions, such as facial expressions or body language.

This condition helps people interacting with the machine to feel less judged, which allows them to interact by idealising their partner and feeling freer to share painful, embarrassing or intimate thoughts.
The possibility of a one-night stand with an android is much closer than we want to imagine.

Maybe people today do not believe they can fall in love with a computer, but they are likely to want to handle love in such a simple way.
The difference between the film and reality is that right now no machine can sustain the illusion of being real for long and cannot convince us that it can have a mind of its own.

Computers are influencing much of human capability by modifying some and replacing others. Just think of the difficulty of memorising a telephone number or remembering a road travelled in a car with the help of a navigator.

Some companies are investing in artificial intelligence to reduce human error associated with many activities. This is the case, for example, with the car manufacturer Toyota, which is in the process of developing a device capable of reacting to the emotional states of drivers in order to prevent reactions that could impair the driver’s state of consciousness, such as anger or tiredness. Through a small camera inside the vehicle, software will be able to reconstruct as many as 238 basic facial elements, identifying the expression and linking it to the related emotion.

Surely technology is helping us and will be a valuable support for our future, but will replacing technology in our relationships really make us happy?

Imperfection, the presence of the unexpected, conflicts, but above all the possibility of living and experiencing emotions are fundamental in our lives.

But how skilful are we in enhancing and managing them?