Facial and vocal indicators of emotion are constant between cultures, and there’s now a body of research which enables computers to read them with good accuracy.
This panel (a venture capitalist, an academic, and several entrepreneurs working to develop emotional computing applications) discuss the implications. For example, we’re good at being aware of others’ emotions, but not our own. Could a computer assistant help us with our lifestyle choices and guide us towards practices and ways of living that put us in a better mood and in better health overall? Could we assess mental health and physical pain more accurately? (Answer: it looks highly likely.)
On the other hand, will the use of emotion tracking while people consume media and experience products put us into the hands of manipulators? (Answer: not yet, but perhaps soon. However, the payoff for users will need to be there for this to gain acceptance.)
There are cultural differences in the expression of emotion, too, which show up in aggregated data.
(1 hr 18 min)
My speculations:
1. We’ve already heard about the “bubble”, where FB or Google will show you things they think you’ll respond positively to, and you end up not aware of contrasting viewpoints. What happens if they start only showing you things that make you happy? How does that affect online activism, for example? (I have in mind Paulo Bacigalupi’s short story “The Gambler”, in which click-driven journalism drowns out serious and important issues with a tide of celebrity scandal.)
2. It’s already possible to assess a crowd’s predominant affect in near-real time (this video shows an example near the end). If this became real-time, and you played it back concurrently to, say, a political speaker – the kind of person who’s currently driven by polls, but has the mental agility to adapt his or her speech based on what people are responding to – what kind of politics would you get? I’m envisioning a standard app for speakers here, designed to prompt a boring executive to hurry through the PowerPoint when the audience starts to disengage, but repurposed for mass manipulation by a clever and adaptable demagogue. Instead of a teleprompter, the speaker watches an affect evaluation screen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSj26ncU_po&feature=share