The word fear is derived from an old Germanic word that referred to danger. So, fear is the feeling of being in danger. Of course, we aren’t just afraid of what we see right in front of us. Fear is often held in anticipation of something terrible that’s waiting around the corner.
The thing is that people aren’t always the best judges of when they’re really in danger. We can be convinced to be afraid when there isn’t really any chance of harm, and conversely, we can be lulled into a false sense of security when we are actually under serious threat.
There was a time when the saying “There is nothing to fear but fear itself” was reassuring. Now, artificial intelligence holds the reins of our fears, and fear itself is becoming downright terrifying.
This week, Amazon announced that its AI facial scanning system, named Rekognition, has gained the ability to detect when people are feeling afraid. This alarming news led
The answer is even more disturbing than the question. Amazon, and a host of Emotion AI companies like it, plan to use emotion detection as the first step in a system of massive emotion manipulation. The idea is that Amazon’s artificial intelligence will begin by automatically detecting your fear, then use machine learning, through A/B testing, to automatically devise ways to use your fears to obtain results that are profitable for Amazon… regardless of the emotional consequences to you.
There’s another word for this: Torture. This is worst than traditional torture, though, because with this torture, there won’t even be another human being in the room along with the victim. The only company we’ll have is a machine, designed to detect and exploit every emotional vulnerability we have.
Understanding emotion isn’t just a warm and fuzzy exercise in empathy for the sake of empathy. Emotion gets to the core of everything that matters most about being human. To understand emotion is a responsibility that must not be abused.
We can take some solace in the fact that, on the very same day that Amazon made its announcement about its fearful achievement with Rekognition, there was another, less flattering story about the Emotion AI system. It seems that Rekognition, when presented with photographs of the members of California’s state legislature, concluded that one out of five of them was a criminal fugitive, wanted for arrest.
Amazon has been selling its Rekognition services to police departments, saying that it will help them find and arrest criminal fugitives. It turns out that most of what Rekognition’s highly unreliable technology will do is send police off on wild goose chases.
So, it’s likely that Amazon’s claims about Rekognition’s ability to detect fear are highly exaggerated. Hype is the biggest trend coming out of Silicon Valley these days.
What remains, however, is the fact that the most powerful corporations in the world, organizations more wealthy than most nations on earth, are eagerly pursuing the development of technologies capable of torturing and twisting the emotions of human beings in order to extract money from them.
If they succeed, the future will be fear itself.
