AFFECTIVE COMPUTING

Here comes the future!

You think only your spouse or the dog can detect if you are in a lousy mood? Think again! Computer will soon be able to detect and appropriately respond to your state of mind.

            Affective computing, also known as AC, is an area concerned with gathering data from faces, voices and body language to measure human emotions. An important business goal of AC is to build human-computer interfaces that can offer a variety of applications. For example, AC programming can help physicians who deal with patients remotely to quickly understand a patient's mood or look for signs of depression.
            AC uses a computing device to gather cues about a person’s emotional state from a variety of sources other than facial expressions such as muscle tension, posture, hand and shoulder gestures, speech patterns, heart rate, pupil dilation and body temperature.

            So if I understand this correctly even if I smile to my boss to hide the fact that I had a bit too much to drink at lunch because I can’t stand her, her computer will sell me out? In other words we are entering an age where secrecy about personal views and feelings will be a thing of the past! Food for thought, don’t you think?

            I feel for the future of mankind. Having some small measure of control over what I may choose to show the world has always been sacred as far as I am concerned. If that is taken away, won’t we become merely fodder for machines? That is truly scary.

            How far will this new world go before people dare to revolt??