Emotion recognition systems are finding growing use, from monitoring customer responses to ads to scanning for ‘distressed’ women in danger.
Emotion recognition systems are finding growing use, from monitoring customer responses to ads to scanning for ‘distressed’ women in danger.
There are uses for it. They can track the average mood of an entire room over a period of time. If you use that somewhere like a restaurant, or a banquet venue, then that information can be useful for tweaking the policies, environment, prices, etc. Of course an actual human could do this too, just by being there. I think it’ll get the most use at places like casinos where they’re always using psychological tricks to make people want to gamble. Ironically I don’t think that “happy” is the mood they’ll be aiming for.
Ya, I guess I can see some uses for it, but nothing that makes the risks of it’s existence worth it.
It seems like every tool/tech will be used by good people to do good things and bad people to do bad things. Some things like a spoon are handy for getting good things done but not very useful to bad people to do bad things with. Other tools like mood recognition might be quite handy for bad people looking to control others, but only moderately useful to good people.
Tools in that second group I think we should be wary of letting them exist. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done or that it can be called “progress”.
It has already existed for a decade or so. I’m surprised it hasn’t made headlines before. I saw a working demo of it at the Microsoft Visitor Center about 8 years ago. In addition to estimating your mood, it also assigns you a persistent ID, estimates your height, weight, eye color, hair color, ethnicity, and age. It is scarily accurate at all of those things. That ID can be shared across all linked systems at any number of locations. I completely agree with you that there are a lot of concerning, if not downright terrifying implications of this system. It’s a privacy nightmare.