Ethical Issues in Affective Computing

Affective computing is bound up with ethics at multiple levels, from codes governing studies with human participants to debates about the proper relationship between ethical and emotional systems within an agent. Behind the debates lie ethical principles which are powerful, but divergent. In some areas (e.g. data protection and research with human participants) explicit codes give them legal force. Elsewhere, they give rise to characteristic imperatives: to increase net positive affect, to avoid deception, to respect autonomy, to ensure that systems’ competence is understood, and to provide morally acceptable portraits of people. There are also widely discussed concerns with less clear connections either to classical ethics or to the real abilities of the technology, but they still need to be addressed.

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