08 April 2019

Affectiva Emotion AI




The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Rosalind Picard eventually became part of this new emotion detection industry with a company called Affectiva. By 2016, Rana El-Kaliouby was Affectiva’s CEO, redefining its business as “Emotion AI” and calling it the next frontier of artificial intelligence. The company had raised $34 million in venture capital, included 32 Fortune 100 companies and 1,400 brands from all over the world among its clients, and claimed to have the largest repository of emotion data in the world, with 4.8 million face videos from 75 countries, continuing to expand its supply routes with data sourced from online viewing, video game participation, driving, and conversation.

This is the commercial context in which Kaliouby came to feel that it is perfectly reasonable to assert that an “emotion chip” will become the base operational unit of a new “emotion economy.” She speaks to her audiences of a chip embedded in all things everywhere, running constantly in the background, producing an emotion pulse.





No comments: