The brain is the final frontier. This amazing piece of wetware that we still don’t fully understand yet still feel compelled to tinker with. And in the years to come that’s exactly what we’ll do from apps that help us get better sleep to neural implants that make us smarter and everything in between. Starting with the idea of intelligent systems capable of detecting our emotions and offering up solutions to make us feel better.
As Futurism puts it:
“If new research is to believed, you may find yourself coming home from work one day in a rotten mood — just to have your smart speaker automatically scan your emotions and start to play soothing music.
That’s one use case for a new neural network that Queen May University of London engineers taught how to automatically interpret certain human emotions — by blasting people with radio waves and picking up on emotional cues like changes in their heartbeat. The algorithm can detect feelings including fear, disgust, joy, and relaxation with 71 percent accuracy, according to research published earlier this month in the journal PLOS One. That’s far from perfect, but impressive enough that it could find some real-world use in our lives.”
Venture Beat describes what some of these other real-world uses may be and what the implications of using them could be:
“Ahsan Noor Khan, a PhD student and first author of the study, said: “We’re now looking to investigate how we could use low-cost existing systems, such as Wi-Fi routers, to detect emotions of a large number of people gathered, for instance in an office or work environment.” Among other things, this could be useful for HR departments to assess how new policies introduced in a meeting are being received, regardless of what the recipients might say. Outside of an office, police could use this technology to look for emotional changes in a crowd that might lead to violence.
The research team plans to examine public acceptance and ethical concerns around the use of this technology. Such concerns would not be surprising and conjure up a very Orwellian idea of the ‘thought police’ from 1984. In this novel, the thought police watchers are expert at reading people’s faces to ferret out beliefs unsanctioned by the state, though they never mastered learning exactly what a person was thinking.
This is not the only thought technology example on the horizon with dystopian potential. In ‘Crocodile,’ an episode of Netflix’s series Black Mirror, the show portrayed a memory-reading technique used to investigate accidents for insurance purposes. The ‘corroborator’ device used a square node placed on a victim’s temple, then displayed their memories of an event on screen. The investigator says the memories: ‘may not be totally accurate, and they’re often emotional. But by collecting a range of recollections from yourself and any witnesses, we can help build a corroborative picture.’
If this seems farfetched, consider that researchers at Kyoto University in Japan developed a method to “see” inside people’s minds using an fMRI scanner, which detects changes in blood flow in the brain. Using a neural network, they correlated these with images shown to the individuals, and projected the results onto a screen. Though far from polished, this was essentially a reconstruction of what they were thinking about. One prediction estimates this technology could be in use by the 2040s.”
While some people may be wary of such thought detection, fearing that their private thoughts would become private knowledge and that they would all sense of privacy, I on the other hand welcome this new technology so long as it’s done in a tasteful, abstract way to analyze large crowds or bring improvement to our daily lives. So long as the AI knows our general sentiments, not our specific thoughts.
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