All technology encounters resistance from people initially, as time goes by some get adopted faster than others; this is a fact. If one wants a certain amount of business news to be known in the world about the service they offer, then the use of technology is a must. One of the technologies within the domain of artificial intelligence that is just getting started is emotion recognition through cameras and E.E.G..

I’ve written about the many ways this technology could be used, and the ethics behind it. It’s an area of artificial intelligence that is starting to get attention because of how interesting, intriguing and important it is.

On a recent episode of Should This Exist, many of these cases and issues were discussed by experts: Should emotion recognition technology exist?

Listen to it to get that perspective. I’m going to answer the question from another perspective…

How good do you believe you are at recognizing other people’s emotions? If you’ve been on this Earth for a while, I’m sure you’re very confident in your ability. But the truth is most of us are not very good at it, and computers can help.

My company, Netek, is also in this space and this is why we believe this technology should exist: Beyond humanizing technology, the interaction between humans and computers, I’ve seen that we’ve become more empathetic, or better and paying attention to others emotions, since we started and researching and developing this technology 5 years ago.

We spend so much time experimenting with this technology that our team has become more aware of other people’s emotions. How do I know this? Because they’ve all said how they feel they’ve become better people when they interact with friends, loved ones, family members and colleagues.

I think this matters in the discussion because organizations, whether they say it or not, are racing toward automation to stay ahead of competition regardless of impact on workers. Empathy is a key skill that will be hard for computers to replicate, and they’re nowhere near replacing us, but they can certainly enhance our abilities.

It’s not human versus machine, it’s human plus machine.