Heart of the Machine

Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence

By: Richard Yonck

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

Imagine a robotic stuffed animal that can read and respond to a child's emotional state or a commercial that can change based on a customer's facial expression. Heart of the Machine explores the next giant step in the relationship between humans and technology: the ability of computers to recognize, respond to, and even replicate emotions.

Computers have long been integral to our lives, and their advances continue at an exponential rate. Many believe that artificial intelligence equal or superior to human intelligence will happen in the not-too-distance future. Futurist Richard Yonck argues that emotion, the first, most basic, and most natural form of communication, is at the heart of how we will soon work with and use computers.

Instilling emotions into computers is the next leap in our centuries-old obsession with creating machines that replicate humans. But for every benefit this progress may bring to our lives, there is a possible pitfall. Emotion recognition could lead to advanced surveillance, and the same technology that can manipulate our feelings could become a method of mass control. Heart of the Machine is an exploration of the new and inevitable ways in which mankind and technology will interact.

©2017 Richard Yonck (P)2017 Tantor

Critic reviews

"A fascinating, and sometimes disturbing, look at a rapidly approaching future where smart machines understand and manipulate our emotions - and ultimately bond with us in ways that blur the line between ourselves and our technology." (Martin Ford, New York Times best-selling author of Rise of the Robots)

Very informative and well narrated

The Heart of the Machine is a very insightful book to read, and listening to it was not a bad idea. The narrator is amazing and has a non-sleepy tone. I love both the book and the audible.

This is not a commute listening book, take your time and enjoy!

The book discusses in detail a lot of info on affective computing, AI, robotics, chatbots, IT interfaces, emotional intelligence, and emotional empathy, but the main theme is emotions. The main questions the book is trying to answer are, where are we in the progress to have affective computing systems? What is the role of emotional/affective computing in the map of technological advancements?, and how will the world look like if our machines have emotions?

It is a book that brings the science behind H.E.R and A.I movies to the reader in order to understand where we are now from emotional empathetic machines, and how the future may look like.

A book on machine emotion read with zero emotion

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I would recommend a friend get the kindle version of this book. The topics are interesting but the performance was completely flat.

Were the concepts of this book easy to follow, or were they too technical?

They were at a fine level but the performance got in the way

How could the performance have been better?

Give a little emotion. The reader sounded like a late night FM radio host on Nyquil.

Was Heart of the Machine worth the listening time?

Not really

Excellent storytelling about machine intelligence

The book try to Focus on Emotion Artificial Intelligence and the way we Will Interact with It.
There's good information about the field... in general a good book to read and an introduction to the theme.
Don't forget to read Picard book's which open the field.

Good read...

Intuitive AI - Machines with emotion

Great thinking of possible scenarios of future AI told in intuitive ways. Great audio book!

HUMAN SINGULARITY

Richard Yonck notes human learning is intimately connected with emotion. Emotions of parents and offspring arguably shape children’s view of the world as much as genetic inheritance. Yonck explains parents’ and people’s faces become a school from which children learn the characteristics of emotion. Yonck explains emotional signals reinforce human’ memory, belief, and behavior.

Yonck is a TED conference speaker. His writings have a quality of entertainment that makes him interesting if not steeped in science. On balance, Yonck appears more optimistic than pessimistic about the future of A.I. whether emotion programing for machines occurs or not.

Fascinating book about AI

This is a fascinating book that lays out the implications of AI and how the future may shape. I particularly enjoyed exploring the “Affective Computing” and the role of human emotion. For someone without much AI knowledge, I learned tons about AI. Overall, this book was a great read. From start to finish, the book is thought provoking and well-written with a lot of insights.

Very enlightening

A rational presentation of our co-evolution with technology and possible futures. This should be required reading for all policy makers.

Trivial, trite, superficial and why bother

This book was a dud for me. One would think any book on machines becoming more human like would be a winner. One would be wrong. I found his mostly current musings on the topic trite and superficial (maybe I'm being redundant, but when a book is as superfluous as this book I don't mind being redundant with my insults). Even his tying autism into his story seemed to lack depth of any kind. I have no idea why this author wrote the book, but the first rule of book writing should be along the lines of assuming that the reader is interested in the topic and wants to learn something new. The book fails that first rule.

One other thing: Shame on the New York Times and their book review section. They had Ray Kurzweil write the review for this book and "Thinking Machine" within a double review, and he wrote a really, really favorable review for both books. Nothing wrong with that since that's a matter of opinion, but they really, really should have warned the reader that both books sung the praises of Kuzrweill within their texts and that the reviewer might not have been able to separate that from an honest review (I'm not saying that Kurzweil didn't like the books, but I wish I had been warned of the potential conflict that the reviewer would have in giving an honest review). For me, both books were duds, insignificant, lacked depth, and I would have been better off re-reading a Kurzweil book.