On the History of Emotions and Artificial Intelligence: Reshaping Practices of Emotion Research

Creative Language Technologies

This is episode #8 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 23rd of December 2021. In today’s show, I am talking to Dr. Rob Boddice, Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences, Tampere University, Finland, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University, Canada. He is the author or editor of 11 books, most recently ‘Humane Professions’ (2021), ‘Emotion, Sense, Experience’, with Mark Smith (2020), ‘A History of Feelings’ (2019), and ‘The History of Emotions’ (2018). ‘Feeling Dis-Ease in Modern History’, co-edited with Bettina Hitzer, will be published by Bloosmbury in the Spring of 2022. He is currently completing a book called ‘Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion and Experience’ for Polity Press.

Professor Boddice’s recent book ‘Emotion, Sense, Experience’, with Mark Smith, published last year, is the focus of this show. We start by addressing the central role of emotions in understanding experience, especially experience in the past. In his book, Rob advocates for a broader dialogue on the treatment of the senses and emotions that would lead to “a more accurate, robust, and ultimately, more meaningful history of human experience” (Boddice & Smith, 2020). And, in doing so, he insists in the reconstruction of context to the maximum extent possible, to understand the practical framework in which experience is produced — otherwise, he says, “we risk transfiguring the feelings of others into one’s own” — imposing the present on the past. But accessing the situated ways of hearing, feeling, touching, sensing is very difficult and has been done so far through a very zoomed in analysis of the context. The best, he believes, is probably to represent that distance between past and present — and emotions should not be kept separate from the senses - especially when working with experiences in the past.

In the second part of the show, we tackle issues related to the role of technology (especially Artificial Intelligence) in shaping our emotion and sensory awareness, and practices of emotion research in the next decade. We close with a discussion on whether historians can and should keep AI ethical and on track. Here is the show.

Show Notes:

- What is to say ‘History of X’? (where X can be emotion, feelings, experience) and what is experience, especially felt experience?

- How many emotions are out there? How should we study them - in isolation, or as a united whole? Is there a boundary between reason and emotion?

- The critical need for an interdisciplinary approach to the history of emotions.

- Emotion AI: rather challenging to build, adding to this the recent backlash from the Ethics community on the consequences of AI due to the misunderstanding of the nature of emotions. Would a change in our understanding of emotions lead to the ‘right’ technology?

- Immersive Technology: the role of AI in shaping our emotion and sensory awareness, and practices of emotion research in the next decade (or so); Can immersive technology help historians access the past? And, can/should historians keep AI ethical and on track?

For more information on Prof. Boddice’s books:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/emotion-sense-experience/DBE24D02C6367B362884DAC8A002F69F
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/feeling-disease-in-modern-history-9781350228375