Modelling emotion, perfecting heart: disassembling technologies of affect with an android bodhisattva in Japan

Abstract

As part of a surge in technologies with so‐called ‘artificial emotional intelligence’, robotics engineers and Buddhist monks in Japan have developed an android bodhisattva to deliver teachings at a popular Zen temple. Like many recent robots in Japan, the android is designed to impact visitors’ feelings. For this reason, it can be called a ‘technology of affect’. In order to communicate how new affective technologies are facilitating intimacy in human‐machine relations in Japan, we employ the concept of ‘disassembling’. By conceptually disassembling technologies of affect and placing them in performative contexts, we show how technologies of affect also disassemble established associations between artificial agents and the feelings they evoke in popular imaginaries. We argue that identifying these disassembling processes helps demonstrate how emerging AI technologies can engender social change at the level of affect through evocative depictions of machine emotion.

Steps towards a therapeutic artificial intelligence

“…Rid's focus on the corporeal imagination of cybernetics underscores the whole-body, physiological aspects core to the ‘brain’-talk of the time (cf. von Neumann [1945] 1993; Wiener 1948a) – a strong corrective to the neuroscientific reduction of being to brain we are apt to read into that talk (Vidal and Ortega 2017). Cybernetics augmented postwar ‘giant brains’ with a theory and language which made it possible to talk effectively and openly at the highest levels of government and the military as well as in public about machines that could ‘actually think, calculate, make decisions on their own’.…”

“…Mindell (2002, Chapter 1). I take the primary vehicle by which this language entered the vernacular to be Wiener (1948a). Note also Richards (1955, Chapter 10), adapted from Richards’ Macy lecture (Richards 1951), and the commentary on the former by G. S. Fraser (TLS:1955/10/21) – and, as always, the OED , s.v.…”