Emotional AI and the Onlife Self: A New Dawn of a Novel Human-Machine Paradigm

With hyperconnectivity defining the prevalent linkage between artifacts, information, and individuals in Western societies (Hoskins, Tulloc, 2016), the connection between emotions and development of AI is essential, particularly as newer generations struggle increasingly to differentiate between online and offline activities within the infosphere (Floridi, 2014).In this new summer of AI, which will be cyclically followed by a predictable winter (Schuchmann 2019), the difference with the previous ones is that it requires a greater adaptive capacity from the identity, because the virtual environment invades every social and personal sphere in an unprecedented digital/analogue interweaving, in a chiasmus dangerously favourable to false mythologies, forcing us to manage our “user agenda” (Costa, 2018).

The myth of Al is subject to this cyclical nature of analogies and discursive changes, through ideas and concepts coming from other fields to describe its functioning or with the rhetorical use of the future, imagining that current shortcomings and limitations will soon be overcome; Finally, the relevance of controversies over claims of artificial intelligence, which should be considered as an integral part of the discourse surrounding the myth of AI, it increases doubts and false beliefs in public opinion. Technology not only evokes emotions in users, but it also shapes how this affect is expressed, experienced and exhibited.

This dynamic has implications for how the AI myth is formed. The emergence of new narratives is inherent to this new paradigm, in which engagement with artificial intelligence has the potential to influence individual identity, pushing considerations related to human self-determination.

Cultural discourses regarding digital technologies through concepts such as modern imagery or myths as well as the recognition of underlying patterns can provide useful suggestions for examining the rise of more than just the specific myth of AI, but also of technological myths built in other contexts.