Rana el Kaliouby in 2018.
Photo: Elise Amendol/ASSOCIATED PRESSWhat if the disinterested machines that surround us and encroach on every aspect of our lives were sensitive to our emotional states? Imagine fridges reprimanding us for our furtive late-night snacks. Or cars decelerating when we are anxious, or preventing us from driving when we are distracted. Consider laptops offering gentle words of consolation or praise, or washing machines groaning with indignation and wristwatches chastising us for our misdemeanors and lack of attention.
In “Girl Decoded,” Rana el Kaliouby’s compelling vision of an emotionally imbued future for artificial intelligence, indifferent machines are elevated into magnificent humanlike creations. While lacking—for now—the authentic emotions of their human counterparts, emotionally enhanced automatons might nevertheless do a perfectly good job of imitating them.
Such devices, in addition to invigorating human-machine relations, have the potential to convey emotional awareness to people—such as those with autism—who struggle to navigate routine emotions. They may also help track emotional states, predict depressive crises and detect the loss of emotional expression that often accompanies diseases like Parkinson’s. Marketing companies could engage them to evaluate reactions to new products. Had Shakespeare’s Othello possessed such a device, he might have been better equipped to understand Desdemona’s intentions. But how might such an imagined world of machine-facilitated emotional enlightenment be brought to fruition?
Ms. el Kaliouby’s brilliance is demonstrated in the simplicity of her solution. While earning her doctorate at Cambridge University, she learned the importance of nonverbal information as she communicated with her geographically distant family back home. She suspected the intricate facial muscles that enable us to grimace, smile, laugh and frown might provide a conduit into the lexicon of human emotions. Once a range of expressions is defined, they could be incorporated into the anatomical structures of emotionally enabled automatons.
Former archivists of the anatomy of emotions, such as Charles Bell in “Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting” (1806) and Charles Darwin in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872), established the foundations of the science of emotions. Darwin’s unique use of photographic representations was itself rooted in artistic exposition, perhaps influenced by the drawings of the Renaissance painter Giovanni Agostino da Lodi, whose early-16th-century “A Man With Eyes Shut Tight” documented a dystonic facial expression in a remarkable level of detail.
Girl Decoded
By Rana el Kaliouby with Carol Colman
Currency, 338 pages, $28
In his “Handbook of American Indian Languages” (1911), the anthropologist Franz Boas noted that the lexicon of Inuit tribes contained multiple words to describe snow, including a term for softly falling snow. Might machines similarly enable us to address our emotional blindness, allowing us to detect concealed emotions conveyed by subtle deployments of facial muscles? If machines could be taught to read the minutiae of facial movements and capture the process by which raw emotions are translated into facial expressions, it might be possible to construct an extended compendium of human emotions.
Such a resource could help identify emotions that slip between the cracks of more dominant ones. We might, for example, discern a “mirk” as a plausible intermediate between a smile and a smirk. The augmentation of our emotional sensitivities may also provide a basis for addressing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conundrum, articulated in his “Tractatus,” pertaining to things about which “we cannot speak” and must therefore “pass over in silence.”
Inspired by Rosalind Picard’s seminal book “Affective Computing” (1997)—which emphasized the importance of emotions to intelligence, rational decision-making, perception and learning, and reimagined our relationship with machines—Ms. el Kaliouby set out to construct a “mind-reading machine” or “emotion decoder” based on the deciphering of facial features. Given the potential universality of emotions, such a device would need to be relevant to all ethnic groups and cultures.
A fortuitous encounter with Simon Baron-Cohen, a leading autism expert, led Ms. el Kaliouby to his unique archive of videos that captured people displaying a wide range of emotions. With the help of sophisticated machine-learning algorithms, and later innovations while she was a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, Ms. el Kaliouby’s machines eventually learned to recognize a rudimentary “emotional palette” encompassing six different human emotional categories.
The story of how Ms. el Kaliouby invented the first series of machines capable of decoding human emotions is made all the more poignant by the details of her own life. Born into a highly educated, middle-class and relatively strict Muslim family in Cairo, there was nothing in her early life to suggest that she would escape the conventional role that had been cast for her. We encounter her at one moment, in her naive innocence within the idyll of an Egyptian summer, picking scented Ewesi mangos from the trees in her grandmother’s garden, and at another, in a spontaneous act of rebellion, undergoing a personal metamorphosis and deciding to remove her hijab.
Both a candid memoir and a confession, Ms. el Kaliouby’s intriguing book lays bare the emotional complexities of “a nice Egyptian girl” while displaying the steely strength, perseverance and naked willpower that has propelled her to imagine a different type of future for both herself and humankind. As the girl decodes herself, she opens up new hope to address the emotional blindness and “empathy crisis” that affects us all.
Mr. Woolfson is the author of “Life Without Genes.”
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