Get ready for the rise of emotional surveillance 😬

New AI tools claim to measure your personality, emotions, and mood. They can’t of course, because humans aren’t reducible to simplistic criteria, and stuff like your facial expression doesn’t actually reveal much.

And yet:

“The bad news is that software now purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI, and it is coming to watch you. If it isn’t already: Morphcast, for example, has licensed its technology to a mental-health app, a program that monitors schoolchildren’s attention, and McDonald’s, which launched a promotional campaign in Portugal that scanned app users’ faces and offered them personalized coupons based on their (supposed) mood. It is one of many, many such companies doing similar work—the industry term is emotion AI or sometimes affective computing.

Some products analyze video of meetings or job interviews or focus groups; others listen to audio for pitch, tone, and word choice; still others can scan chat transcripts or emails and spit out a report about worker sentiment.”

So, one problem is the totally BS premise, which is that you can look at, say body language, and infer inner thoughts.

Another problem is that these tools will mainly be used for “enhancing worker productivity.” The companies selling digital surveillance advertise all manner of use cases: worker safety, mental health, organizational efficiency, burnout reduction in high-stakes fields such as medicine and transportation.

Of course they do.

A final problem is that this is yet another attack on human dignity.

So, if your new job is managing 20 AI agents because all your colleagues got laid off, it’s not enough to get on with it. You also have to look convincingly happy about it. Dystopian stuff.