privacy – Emotions Considered

There is a clear trend in emotions in general, and in emotions in AI specifically. The idea fascinates us, that something so “personal” can be read/captured by a machine. In many cases people respond with disgust to these new developments, in others, with curiosity, and the rest, with desire.

The facts:

wearable sensors, facial recognition, voice analysis and other technologies exist and are getting better every day. And it is/will be the combination of many of these that provide a “closer” and more accurate reading on the emotional/sensorial moment of a particular person (or group).
the above data is stored and managed by someone/many, and whomever has access to it can know about your health, your feelings, your conversations, etc.
the integration of emotion AI in different contexts and situations (i.e. hospitals, transport, construction, people with disabilities, etc.) brings increased safety and increased quality of life, at the least. The benefits are impactful.

Above image: April 23rd, around the corner from my house. Could such technologies have avoided this dreadful accident?

So, should we focus our emotion-tech-trend in battling against the technologies themselves or bring the focus to the governance of the data gathered through these? Should we request speedier policies to adapt to the rapid tech developments? Maybe new forms of oversight, supervision and control that helps enforce these? And, wouldn’t we want to include here the issues about the data gathered from anything that we write or say using technologies?

These are interesting times for closely monitoring what’s happening in this exciting and controversial field.

Tag: privacy

Don’t worry about machines reading your emotions, worry about those governing them.