Artificial Emotional Intelligence and the Intimate Politics of Robotic Sociality

ABSTRACT This article examines Artificial Emotion Intelligence (AEI) and its application in social robots. It argues that AEI and social robotics intensify practices of data-capture and algorithmic governance by extending the spatial reach of digital surveillance deeper into intimate spaces and individual psyches, with the goal of manipulating human emotional and behavioural responses. The analysis demonstrates the need to more thoroughly engage the multiplicity of theoretical and applied approaches to building artificial intelligence, to question assumptions as to the kinds of intelligence being created, and to consider how a diversity of AI systems infiltrate and reshape the spaces of everyday life.