It often occurs that we miss the correlation between a lot of things
owing simply to the lack of concentrated observation. The more you see, the
less you observe, as Mr. Holmes would have put it. However, we are not going to
talk about anything that is remotely obscure or needs a piercing vision to
understand. We will talk about the relation between the pandemic, the resultant
lockdown and the ensuing emotional roller coaster ride that the world is on
right now.
Let us suppose that the world is a scientific laboratory where human
beings are subjects and everything they say, do, or want is part of an experiment. Would it be possible to
monitor all these metrics manually, provided that there are around 7 billion
subjects? No. That is where artificial intelligence comes into play. While AI
still has its limitations, it has come a long way in terms of processing and
analyzing human speech. So much so that it can now create human speech
retaining all the idiosyncrasies of a speaker. Yes, I am talking about deep
fake.
It all started at the Birkbeck University in 1948 when they tried to
make the machines understand human language for the first time to create a dictionary
look up system. Warren Weaver sent tremors through the post war scientific
community with his 1949 memorandum where
he sets forth the notion that every language is another language in code. So,
the English language can be seen as coded German or vice versa. This triggered
a lot of research in the field of machine translation but it went pretty much
out of hand because of the vastness and nuanced nature of language coupled with
poor computational abilities of that age.
Natural language processing found fresh air on its sails with the
advent of big data. And now, it is moving right into the world of emotional
codes. The journey has amazed us in each of its several turns. From making a
text to speech engine for Dr. Stephen Hawking to intelligent assistants like
Siri and Alexa, it is a long way indeed.
Corona does not have a vaccine yet. The sustenance of the human race
depends largely on their ability to take control over their emotions and act
according to the health advisory. But it is not easy jailing large populations
in their own house with the panic rising.
An Italian organization has used Applied AI to create a system that analyzes
63,000 social media posts every day to extract emotions and sentiments from
them. This helps them monitor the emotional health of the people of the world.
They can follow how the anxiety rises over the lockdown and how it is replaced
by hope and gratitude for the healthcare professionals over time. The pandemic
reminds us It is probably time to rethink humanity, study more into it to find
out the emotional traits that make them human.
