By becoming Emotionally Intelligent, cars will soon empathize with us and help us travel over distance and emotions. Let us see how it may happen.
As AI is being democratized, it will eventually become a major part of the human life. Today while it is still at infancy, there are many ways it may evolve. One potential way of evolution is that the AI systems will be highly personalized to each user as they adapt the traits of the human counterpart.
With humans being highly emotional creatures with different personalities, likes, needs and drives, having a one-AI fit-all strategy is not going to work. Each of us will be able to connect with a friend, who we trust. And that friend should share a lot in common with us to have the connection.
For any given system, there could be a core AI framework that is standardized by the vendor and an outer personalization layer that learns and adapts as it’s associate desires. Without this personalization, the user will not have a genuine connection.
Just like other systems, the automotive or more colloquially, the car is also going to have such a perceiving and personalized AI. The car AI will continuously monitor the driver, its own internals, the external environment it is driving in and the locations it will be travelling into and plan accordingly. It will learn how the user drives and evolves to match him. It will also comprehend his emotional state and act as he wants, thus becoming an Emotionally Intelligent car.
Please note that this is not same as the SAE International’s definitions of autonomy. SAE defines 6 levels of autonomous driving with Level 0 having no driving automation. Level 5 has fully autonomous capability where the system itself manages driving without any human intervention even in cases of emergencies. It is possible to have emotional Intelligence even on a Level 0 autonomous car though the EI attributes could be limited when compared to a higher-level car. The way it can be seen is that the Emotional Intelligence quotient of the car will increase as its autonomous level increases.
Even today a dash cam-based driver monitoring system can warn if it detects the driver being drowsy or no longer having attention on the road. This is one of the first steps towards achieving emotional intelligence. With advancements in AI, we will be able to see more empathetic system that can, for example, play music to match the driver’s emotion on a level 0 car or drive in his style on a higher-level car.
With OEMs working to integrate AI into automotives and increasing sensor and processing capabilities, we will soon be seeing Emotionally Intelligent Cars.