The Creepy Line

Counternotions

The technology, when packaged into a smartphone, for example, can be used to help some of those with Asperger's syndrome to read facial expressions. But it can also be used in a videotelephony app as a surreptitious "lie detector." It could be a great tool during remote diagnosis and counseling in the hands of trained professionals. But it could also be used to record, analyze and track people's emotional state in public venues: in front of advertising panels, as well as courtrooms or even job interviews. It can help overloaded elementary school teachers better decipher the emotional state of at-risk children. But it can also lead focus-group obsessed movie studios to further mechanize character and plot development.

The GPU in our computers is the ideal matrix-vector processing tool to decode facial expressions in real-time in the very near future. It would be highly conceivable, for instance, for a presidential candidate to be peering into his teleprompter to see a rolling score of a million viewers' reactions, passively recorded and decoded in real-time, allowing him to modulate his speech in synchronicity with that real time feedback. Would that be truly "representative" democracy or abdication of leadership?

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 17, 2013 2:08 AM
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