Howard Beale, the prophetically fuming anti-hero from the 1976 film Network, was certainly very angry. Increasingly, according to successive Gallup surveys of the world’s emotional state, we all are.
But possibly not for much longer if artificial intelligence has any say in it. AI was already coming for our jobs; now it is coming for our fury. The question is whether anything has a right to take that fury without permission, and whether anyone is ready to fight for our right to rage.
This month, the separately listed mobile arm of Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank technology empire revealed that it was developing an AI-powered system to protect browbeaten workers in call centres from down-the-line diatribes and the broad palette of verbal abuse that falls under the definition of customer harassment.