Big Brother Knows What's in Your Heart
Peter Greene,
Curmudgucation,
Mar 10, 2021
This article is careful to tell you how you think about this new technology (it's bad, creepy) before telling you what it is. For me, that's usually a warning sign: don't trust what follows. The column is based on a CNN story titled This AI reads children's emotions as they learn. I think it would be more accurate to say it interprets children's emotions. Still, so what? Humans do that all the time; it helps us communicate. Peter Greene informs us that "AI doesn't grok emotions any more than it actually thinks." Again, so what? From where I sit, the main issue is that the AI's analysis is wasted on superficial functionality (specifically: content recommendation). Yes, emotions are complex, and yes, bias has been a problem for AIs, but these are eminently solvable problems (more solvable for an AI, I would say, than for a hardened teacher who persistently misreads a foreigner's expression as a scowl). The rest of the language about the AI 'reading your heart' is nonsense. Reprinted for some reason by NEPC, which is where I found it.
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