No. 114/2022

language that machines lack. “We shouldn’t forget what the essence of human conversation is: above all, our emotions and our ability to recognise and respond to emotions,” Gašić emphasises. She wants to discover howmachines’ language competence can be improved to a level that means they can even be used in psychological consultations. Emotional empathy plays a role in this. If a robot could feel pain, perhaps it would treat people with greater empathy. WHAT GOES ON INSIDE THE BLACK BOX AI? Mutual trust is one of the prerequisites for free and open communication between people. Here, too, AI has some catching up to do. News about fatal accidents caused by self- driving, AI-controlled cars or popular science fiction › An algorithm looking at an image simply sees rows of pixels. Nothing else. Tobias Matzner, professor in the Department of Media, Algorithms and Society at Paderborn University 15 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 114/2022