ORGANIZATION
Hume AI
The artificial intelligence company founded by Alan Cowen with Dacher Keltner as Chief Scientific Advisor, dedicated to ensuring AI is built to improve human emotional well-being rather than merely to optimize engagement or productivity.
Hume AI is a research-oriented AI company founded by Alan Cowen, Keltner's former student and collaborator on the computational emotion research that demonstrated the human voice conveys at least twenty-four emotions without words. Keltner serves as Chief Scientific Advisor, bringing two decades of emotion science into direct engagement with AI development. The company's mission — ensuring AI is built to improve human emotional well-being — represents a specific theoretical position: that emotion is not noise to be filtered out of human-AI interaction but signal to be integrated, that AI systems should be designed around what humans actually are rather than around simplified models of rational utility.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Hume AI emerged from the recognition that contemporary AI systems were being built without adequate grounding in emotion science. The dominant paradigm treated emotion as secondary to cognition, something to be handled through rule-based safety systems or reinforcement learning from human feedback. Cowen and Keltner's position was