Measuring Happiness Around the World Through Artificial Intelligence

TL;DR

This paper employs AI-based emotion detection on street footage to analyze and compare happiness levels across eight global cities, offering an unbiased alternative to traditional survey methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel AI-driven approach to measure societal happiness without relying on sociological assumptions or surveys.

Findings

No significant happiness difference between cities

AI effectively detects emotions from street footage

Provides an unbiased measure of happiness levels

Abstract

In this work, we analyze the happiness levels of countries using an unbiased emotion detector, artificial intelligence (AI). To date, researchers proposed many factors that may affect happiness such as wealth, health and safety. Even though these factors all seem relevant, there is no clear consensus between sociologists on how to interpret these, and the models to estimate the cost of these utilities include some assumptions. Researchers in social sciences have been working on determination of the happiness levels in society and exploration of the factors correlated with it through polls and different statistical methods. In our work, by using artificial intelligence, we introduce a different and relatively unbiased approach to this problem. By using AI, we make no assumption about what makes a person happy, and leave the decision to AI to detect the emotions from the faces of people collected from publicly available street footages. We analyzed the happiness levels in eight different cities around the world through available footage on the Internet and found out that there is no statistically significant difference between countries in terms of happiness.