The Social-Emotional Turing Challenge

Social-emotional intelligence is an essential part of being a competent human and is thus required for human-level AI. When considering alternatives to the Turing Test it is therefore a capacity that is important to test. We characterize this capacity as affective theory of mind and describe some unique challenges associated with its interpretive or generative nature. Mindful of these challenges we describe a five-step method along with preliminary investigations into its application. We also describe certain characteristics of the approach such as its incremental nature, and countermeasures that make it difficult to game or cheat.