The Boundaries of Affective Computing

Affective computing (AC) is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of computer science, psychology, and cognitive science, wich has the aim of studying and developing computational apparatuses capable of detecting, processing, interpreting, and simulating human emotion. It has led to the distinction of two currents in AI research: ‘strong’ AI claims that one day AI technology will reach a level of development such that computing machines will be entertaining thoughts in the same way humans do, with full-fledged, firstperson, subjective, qualitative experience (including emotion); ‘weak’ AI, on the other hand, relies on the conviction that there is an impassable ontological barrier between the phenomena occurring in a human brain and the workings of a computing machine, so that AI must be content with reproducing the appearance and the results of human actions, and giving up the ambitious goal of creating the subjective experience of human thought inside a machine. Despite the alarmist warnings of some scholars about sentient machines taking over humanity, there is no evidence that the claims of strong AI can ever become true; thus claims that machines can entertain thoughts the way humans do belong in science fiction rather than realistic imaginings of the future