13 April 2019

Computerized Emotion Detection




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

The program of emotional rendition began with MIT Media Lab professor Rosalind Picard and the new field of computer science that she called “affective computing.” She was among the first to recognize the opportunity for a computational system to automate the analysis of Ekman’s facial configurations and correlate micro-expressions with their emotional causality. The idea was creating software modules capable of detecting emotions, expressions or other characteristics of a user from image information.

She also noted the possibility of intrusive workplace monitoring, and she voiced reservations about the possibility of a dystopian future in which “malevolent” governmental forces use affective computing to manipulate and control the emotions of populations. By early 2014, Facebook had already applied for an “emotion detection” patent designed to implement each of Picard’s fears.




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