Authentic Emotions: How Artificial Intelligence and Technology are Reshaping Intimacy and Labor

Catalog description

New developments in Artifical Intelligence (AI) and other technologies are challenging how people experience feelings and emotional lives within increasingly isolated, virtual-based societies. This course explores emotional authenticity and “humanness” in contemporary technologies. We will review both classical and contemporary theoretical approaches to emotion across sociology, affect studies, and science and technology studies (STS). Through readings of theoretical and empirical works on the commercialization of emotions and emotional experiences, we will (re)examine concepts of emotional labor and emotional capitalism and increasingly intimate human–AI relationships.