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This trend towards Emotional and Sentiment based Analytics - the acquisition and monetizing every snapshot of our personality. This reduction of our humanity i

This trend towards Emotional and Sentiment based Analytics - the acquisition and monetizing every snapshot of our personality. This reduction of our humanity into a cluster of data points to be used against us by marketing and political campaigns - this is just gasoline on the flames of Silicon Valley techno backlash. People like Affevtiva running facial micro expression algorithms etc. What happens when all this data is complied by your friendly neighborhood Data Broker in the name of a "Better Customer Experience" with realtime FitBit heartrates/sleep quality from Google with Amazon applying tone of voice stress analytics with Apple Pay's recent purchase history on top of ......... I am writing this inside a Facebook VR headset with eyetracking hardware and can't be sure my 'gaze' is not something I have agreed to have monitored in some EULA. If they get these neuro brain machine interfaces to the point they work - I can only imagine the outcome without any established boundaries. And just how can this industry establish boundaries ? Who decides and who decides who decides ?

mjburgess 6y ago
The 'redeeming' aspect of this is that it is doomed to fail. The machine learning systems here are just 'automation by averages' -- they are incapable of measuring any variables which could actually estimate your emotion. Emotions are 'conceptualized bodily states' that the brain adopts in order to atune our motivation/etc. to our environment. Indeed it isn't clear there are any devices we can attach to computer to even take measurements. At best, something like a continuous webcam feed would improve accuracy a little from "almost coinflip", and only for quite extreme emotions. The problem with these systems is precisely that we are fed 'averages'. NOT that they are 'capturing sentiment' (ad-tech propaganda to sell their apps and ads). My concern is that this propaganda is leading to people changing their behaviour: unaware they are being fed 'generic content' for some accidental, meaningless 'singanal' they sent, their habits/emotions/self-perception is being distorted to fit the stupidity of the average.
- lm28469 6y ago
  > My concern is that this propaganda is leading to people changing their behaviour: unaware they are being fed 'generic content' for some accidental, meaningless 'singanal' they sent, their habits/emotions/self-perception is being distorted to fit the stupidity of the average. This is definitely happening on a global scale already. It doesn't matter if a movie is "good", if netflix decides to feed it to everyone it will become #1. It doesn't matter is a song is "good", if spotify decides it's the next hit it will become one. &c. It's like TV or radio on steroids, everyone listen to the same thing, read the same articles, watch the same netflix shows. Anecdata: a lot of my friends started to play chess seemingly out of nowhere, I really didn't get it until I learned there was a new netflix show about chess that made the game hype again

mjburgess 6y ago

The 'redeeming' aspect of this is that it is doomed to fail. The machine learning systems here are just 'automation by averages' -- they are incapable of measuring any variables which could actually estimate your emotion. Emotions are 'conceptualized bodily states' that the brain adopts in order to atune our motivation/etc. to our environment. Indeed it isn't clear there are any devices we can attach to computer to even take measurements. At best, something like a continuous webcam feed would improve accuracy a little from "almost coinflip", and only for quite extreme emotions. The problem with these systems is precisely that we are fed 'averages'. NOT that they are 'capturing sentiment' (ad-tech propaganda to sell their apps and ads). My concern is that this propaganda is leading to people changing their behaviour: unaware they are being fed 'generic content' for some accidental, meaningless 'singanal' they sent, their habits/emotions/self-perception is being distorted to fit the stupidity of the average.

lm28469 6y ago
> My concern is that this propaganda is leading to people changing their behaviour: unaware they are being fed 'generic content' for some accidental, meaningless 'singanal' they sent, their habits/emotions/self-perception is being distorted to fit the stupidity of the average. This is definitely happening on a global scale already. It doesn't matter if a movie is "good", if netflix decides to feed it to everyone it will become #1. It doesn't matter is a song is "good", if spotify decides it's the next hit it will become one. &c. It's like TV or radio on steroids, everyone listen to the same thing, read the same articles, watch the same netflix shows. Anecdata: a lot of my friends started to play chess seemingly out of nowhere, I really didn't get it until I learned there was a new netflix show about chess that made the game hype again