Home Is Where the AI Heart Is [Commentary]

The desire to create a sentient Artificial Intelligence (AI) as complex as a human intelligence, or one that even surpasses it, a superintelligence, is raging. The Economist recently reported “Firms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Baidu have got into an AI arms race, poaching researchers, setting up laboratories and buying start-ups” [1]. On one level, this race reacts to the need for highly sophisticated personal digital assistants to help people navigate the tsunami of information produced by the Internet, spawned from the profit-generating drive of these very same companies [4]. On another level, the race involves getting computer algorithms, and AI technology itself, to understand human emotions and to respond emotionally [7]. Recognition of emotions, feelings, and sentiments has become the gold standard, eclipsing the older view of AI as aspiring to be a rational and conscious intelligent entity, a smart machine. IBM's Watson, a cognitive assistant who won Jeopardy in 2011, aspires to function with “accuracy, confidence and speed” for its naturallanguage processing feats. Watson was to be smart. Now, we want our devices to adapt to us and be personal companions rather than geniuses.