“Heart of the Machine,” the futurist Richard Yonck's new book, contains its important insight in the title. People often think of feelings as secondary or as a sideshow to intellect, as if the essence of human intelligence is the ability to think logically. If that were true, then machines are already ahead of us. The superiority of human thinking lies in our ability to express a loving sentiment, to create and appreciate music, to get a joke. These are all examples of emotional intelligence, and emotional is at both the bottom and top of our thinking. We still have that old reptilian brain that provides our basic motivations for meeting our physical needs and to which we can trace feelings like anger and jealousy. The neocortex, a layer covering the brain, emerged in mammals two hundred million years ago, we got these big foreheads that house the frontal cortex and enabled us to process language and music.
Yonck provides a compelling and thorough history of the interaction between our emotional lives and our technology. He starts with the ability of the early hominids to fashion stone tools, perhaps the earliest example of technology. Remarkably the complex skills required were passed down from one generation to the next for over three million years, despite the fact that for most of this period, language had not yet been invented. Yonck makes a strong case that it was our early ability to communicate through pre-language emotional expressions that enabled the remarkable survival of this skill, and enabled technology to take root.
Yonck describes today's emerging technologies for understanding our emotions using images of facial expressions, intonation patterns, respiration, galvanic skin response and other signals - and how these instruments might be adopted by military and interactive augmented reality experiences. And he recounts how all communication technologies from the first books to today's virtual reality have had significant sexual applications and will enhance sensual experiences in the future.
Yonck is a sure-footed guide and is not without a sense of humor. He imagines, for example, a scenario a few decades from now with a spirited exchange at the dinner table. “No daughter of mine is marrying a robot and that's final!” a father exclaims.
His daughter angrily replies：“Michael is a cybernetic person with the same rights you and I have! We're getting married and there's nothing you can do to change that!” She storms out of the room.
Yonck concludes that we will merge with our technology - a position I agree with - and that we have been doing so for a long time. He argues, as have I, that merging with future super-intelligent A.I.s is our best strategy for ensuring a beneficial outcome. Achieving this requires creating technology that can understand and master human emotion. To those who would argue that such a quest is arrogantly playing God, he says simply：“This is what we do.”
