I think, actually I’m sure, that it will shape a new age of empathic technology. In the not too distant future, we’ll be creating machines which comprehend us humans at a psychological level. They’ll infer our internal states – emotions, attention, personality, health and so on – to help us make useful decisions.

But let’s just press pause on the future for a moment and track how far we’ve come. Back in 2015, media headlines were screaming about the coming dystopia/utopia of artificial intelligence. On one hand, we were all doomed. Humans faced the peril of extinction from robots, or were at least at risk of having their jobs snatched away by machine learning bots.

On the other hand, many people – me included – were looking forward to a future where machines answered their every need. We grasped the fact that intelligent automation is all about augmenting human endeavour, not replacing it.

Training the future AI workforce

Five or six years on, we can look back on significant change. We have a plethora of institutes and academies training the future AI workforce, buoyed by multibillion dollar resources. We have bigger datasets, bigger Graphical Processing Units (the GPUs that perform millions of calculations in parallel) and bigger neural networks (the brain-like system of algorithms dedicated to perception).

All of the above has contributed to extraordinary breakthroughs and more excited headlines. Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence defeated the world’s number one Go player, much to the dismay of Ke Jie, who was a ‘little sad’ because he thought he’d played pretty well.

If you want a creative escape from quarantine, you can now go online to create a personalised poem, with the help of AI. And if you want a little light reading on the side, you can catch up with the thoughts of the GPT-3 language generator, writing here exclusively for The Guardian.

The status quo sucks

That’s all well and good, but I’m staying out on a limb here to say that in my opinion the status quo sucks. I’d argue that there’s been remarkably little tangible progress in the products and services that you and I interact with in our personal and professional lives. Maybe I should rephrase that. There hasn’t been enough of the right kind of progress for me.

As I’ve already alluded to, we’ve made great strides making machines with logical intelligence – but what about the social, emotional or even ethical intelligence? Put it this way, I’m sure Google’s AI didn’t put its metaphorical arm around Ke Jie to console him in defeat.

Let me share my frustration here. My smart speaker happily misunderstands me six times in a row – and has no qualms about responding in the exact same way a seventh time. Infuriating. And let’s say I’m test driving a top-of-the-range motor. It might have all the AI-powered bells and whistles when it comes to sensing danger or staying in lane, but it hasn’t a clue whether I’m enjoying the drive or not. See where I’m going with this?

As I said at the outset, technology doesn’t get me, you or any of us. Each day I am constantly having to adjust to every piece of technology I interact with. Rather than accounting for me and my needs, I am pouring energy into adjusting to technology. I just think it should be the other way round.

I believe in a future where each and every piece of technology takes account of my emotions, behaviours and wants, to give me the best possible outcome. Instead of a passive interface, I expect products and services to understand my state and make decisions to aid me in my life. That’s not too much to ask, surely.

As we dig a little deeper into this, you might argue that there are already many products and services that make assessments of the human state. Wearables that help track our sleep quality, for example, or biomarkers that track our stress levels. That’s true, and to date we’ve been able to approach successively difficult problems by treating each as a data problem to be fixed with bigger AI.

But here’s the thing: we know that empathy is not equal to the amount of data processed. To truly move forward I believe machines need to truly understand humans, and that can only mean one thing. HMU.