Emotion-detecting tech should be restricted by law

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50761116

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

84 55 7 years ago

bbc.com

sambull• 7 years ago

You dont all where balaclavas and sunglasses when interacting with technology?

dvtrn• 7 years ago

My juggalo makeup works even better.

[0]https://www.fastcompany.com/90373952/to-thwart-face-recognit...

livueta• 7 years ago

This truly is the cyberpunk world line: time to break out the mirrorshades.

mrob4• 7 years ago

And we should ban prosthetic limbs because amputees might use them to smuggle drugs.

Emotion-detection tech is a prosthetic for autistic people, and if it's banned I want consistent treatment for all disabilities.

zepto• 7 years ago

Make it prescription only.

dbsmith83• 7 years ago

Give me a break. People don't use prosthetic limbs as a tool to decide if someone is lying to the police or if they should get the job. Your analogy is less than adequate.

dang2• 7 years ago

Can you please edit swipes like "Give me a break" out of your posts to HN? Your comment would be fine with just the other two sentences.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

detaro• 7 years ago

Emotion-detection tech is a prosthetic for autistic people

Never heard of it being used that way. Not sure how current tools would work for that. Examples?

mrob4• 7 years ago

AFAIK it is not yet used this way in practice, but I see no reason it couldn't be integrated into AR glasses. This would allow autistic people to interact socially on an equal footing with neurotypical people.

kingkawn2• 7 years ago

How we express our emotions will change and this will be useless

DonHopkins2• 7 years ago

You have a point. First there were words and punctuation, then the punctuation agglutinated into emoticons, now we have Unicode emojis, but peaches and eggplants are obscene, white space is significant, periods are rude, ellipses are ominous, and at-signs are sphincters.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/gene-weing...

“Why would anyone use a period in an IM or text? Using periods in informal communications is rude.”
“What millennials really want to know is why boomers sometimes end innocuous statements with three dots. That makes everything sound ... ominous.”
Another millennial of my acquaintance told me something else: The casual use of an @ to mean “at,” as in, “Are you going to be @ the office?” is interpreted by millennials as a deep offense: By code, you are calling them a sphincter!

caseymarquis• 7 years ago

I'm in the cohort described in the article, and I call BS on using periods being rude. Omitting periods when sending multiple sentences makes your message jumbled garbage.

throwaway07Ju19• 7 years ago

I am not sure this is possible without extensive training. I once had a an assignment to meet with someone I had come to despise. But my face cringed just at the thought of sitting across from this person. So before the meeting I put a fake brace on my left arm and explained that if I look mad or frustrated it was because I am in physical pain. I was able to get through the interview and get information he might have withheld had he sensed I was hostile towards him.

larnmar• 7 years ago

Unlikely; emotional expressions seem to be innate and hard-wired into the brain, hence the fundamental similarity between emotional expressions of groups separated for tens of thousands of years.

eli_gottlieb• 7 years ago

Unlikely; emotional expressions seem to be innate and hard-wired into the brain

Nope. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/emotional-...

kingkawn2• 7 years ago

All of whom are connected and changing together now.

Also; hard-wired by who or what other than volume of use?

gojomo• 7 years ago

To protect the jobs & social status of those lucky enough to have a natural aptitude at emotion/deception-detection?

Lammy• 7 years ago

To ensure that the ruling body telling you what you can't use is the only group that gets to use it.

dandanqu823• 7 years ago

As someone from a less represented group in tech, I would want to know exactly who is classifying emotions present on the dataset. I don’t want to be mistaken as feeling angry anytime I don’t look happy or sad. There’s definitely unconscious bias to how certain people’s feelings are interpreted that lead to inaccurate perceptions.

randyrand• 7 years ago

Note: as long as you are well represented in the dataset your representation in tech won’t matter.

jakelazaroff• 7 years ago

Historically, these two things have been correlated.

dandanqu823• 7 years ago

I can be well represented in the data set, but here people can unwittingly classify my emotions incorrectly due to unconscious bias. What good will the data do if every time, I appear confused, I am labeled and angry?

coffeefirst• 7 years ago

Agreed. This all smells like snake oil to me. If they've gotten it to work at all, there's no chance it works for all people in all circumstances.

DonHopkins2• 7 years ago

Maybe certain professionally empathic people at MIT Media Lab should have used their high-tech emotion detection software to determine if Joi Ito was lying through his teeth to cover his ass by an appeal to authority when citing the names of a bunch of "very respected & well-known" people who vouched for Epstein being reformed. I still would love to know what the names of those people are, and if they're "well known", are they still "very respected"? How about a bit of empathy for his victims, huh?

https://twitter.com/RosalindPicard/status/116899800880720281...

quotemstr3• 7 years ago

As a practical matter, it is not possible to prohibit the use of an algorithm, and any attempt to do so will cause more harm than anything that algorithm might possibly do.

That we're even talking about restricting tech that tells us true things about the world indicates that the level of internal contradiction in the standard worldview has reached an unacceptable level. Only a bankrupt and illegitimate philosophy needs to prop itself up with censorship and bans on true statements.

You can't hold back progress, but you do have a choice between sticking your head in the sand and facing the technological change head-on and making the most of it.

AI Now

Oh, this is AI Now. The article makes sense now. This organization isn't a research group. It's a political advocacy organization dressed up as a research group. All they do is put an "AI" spin on the standard tech-activist political agenda. You don't have to actually read any of their papers, since the conclusion is always the same: they get to decide what technology you can use.

carapace3• 7 years ago

That we're even talking about restricting tech that tells us real things about the world indicates that society's internal contradictions on certain subjects have reached a breaking point and that we need to reevaluate certain previously-inviolable assumptions.

I agree with your general point, but TFA quotes a co-founder of "leading research centre" saying,

"At the same time as these technologies are being rolled out, large numbers of studies are showing that there is... no substantial evidence that people have this consistent relationship between the emotion that you are feeling and the way that your face looks."

So a large part of the problem is that we're rolling out cargo-cult crap without adequate self-reflection. (That's a different problem than our tech forcing us to confront real things we would rather leave latent.)

quotemstr3• 7 years ago

large numbers of studies are showing that there is... no substantial evidence that people have this consistent relationship between the emotion that you are feeling and the way that your face looks.

Total, absolute bullshit --- which is exactly what I'd expect from AI Now. Everyday experience shows that we can read people's feelings via their faces. (Yes, deception is possible, but the possibility of putting on a fake face validates the thesis!) Happy people look happy. Sad people look sad. Millennia of literature and art confirm. "Large numbers of studies" confirm lots of things that would be convenient if true, but aren't. The social sciences are totally and catastrophically broken.

These expressions are older than people. Even dogs and humans can read each others' emotions. Anyone who's met a dog understands that you can tell that a happy dog is happy. I'm amazed that the person quoted in the article was able to make the above claim with a straight face.

So a large part of the problem is that we're rolling out cargo-cult crap without adequate self-reflection.

So what? Astrology doesn't work either and we don't have to go around banning that. If this technology didn't actually work, activist groups wouldn't be trying to ban it.

currymj• 7 years ago

you can definitely tell people not to do certain things or use certain technologies and it mostly works.

as a simple example, sometimes when getting access to a dataset, you have to sign a contract agreeing not to try to de-anonymize or identify any individuals included. both sides on the contract know it is possible and perhaps easy, but they're making a legally-enforceable agreement to prevent it.

this sort of thing, or regulations enforcing similar restrictions on certain industries and institutions, is not the same thing as trying to outright ban any spread of a new technology or stop its use completely everywhere.

criddell• 7 years ago

It's also not possible to prohibit speeding yet there are still laws that are occasional enforced.

The law generally prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, and sometimes age. Why can't that list be expanded?

jdc• 7 years ago

Emotion-detecting technology is software and distribution of source code is speech, ergo banning it infringes on free speech.

However it might make sense to ban its use in certain cases — like say in order to manipulate public opinion for instance.

pgt• 7 years ago

There is a difference between lockpicking tutorials and breaking & entering by picking locks.

chillacy• 7 years ago

The article mentions police investigations as one use case.

Mass surveillance technology is software and speech too, but we also might want to live in a world where it is restricted in application.

reaperducer• 7 years ago

When I first read that some retailers (Walgreens) were putting face-scanning emotion profiling tech in their stores, I couldn't help but think about how many false readings would come from people who have resting bitch face.†

Then I thought it would be awesome to go to Dallas or some other place where this is common and flood the stores with these people, making the technology useless.

† https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resting_bitch_face

paggle• 7 years ago

When all the retailers share data they’ll identify you as Rufus Postlethwaite and calibrate to your resting bitch face.

watt3rpig• 7 years ago

So I guess with my anxiety disorder even computers will think “I have something to hide” because I look nervous. Jesus christ this world is a dystopia.

smkellat• 7 years ago

Anxiety disorder, bipolar, and more will definitely help paint targets on you. I'm really not liking this brave new world we're heading into. This tech will only be as smart as the lowest bidder makes it and frankly that should terrify anyone with family who don't fit a stereotype defined as "normal". I have family that would need protection from something like this.

conistonwater2• 7 years ago

If it makes you feel any better, before computers it was the security guards that thought you had something to hide instead.

pubutil• 7 years ago

However, we tend to see a computer’s analysis as absolute while a security guard’s analysis is more of an opinion.

You can also reason with a security guard. The trust we have in the computer’s analysis prevents a perceived shoplifter from reasoning against the accusation, for better or worse.

loriverkutya• 7 years ago

The difference is that security guards did not recorded each and every customer and built a database of people visited any store in any country and also not going to sell that database to the highest bidder and not going to hacked be by state backed groups.

krageon3• 7 years ago

If there were security guards sure. That's not exactly a given.

m3kw9• 7 years ago

Isn’t every ad tech emotion detection? A like is an emotion

arielweisberg• 7 years ago

Oh this is fun. So how clear is your hue?

There was an anime about where this might head https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass

Classic Dr. Who also had a fictional place where you had to be happy, but I don’t recall the tech angle that arc used.

Emotion-detecting tech should be restricted by law

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