AI Doesn't Know How You Feel - BLARB

"Awkward giggles," confusion, and nervousness: on October 21, Fujitsu Labs announced their software would be able to detect all of these emotional expressions and feelings. In May, journalists reported Amazon was working on a wearable device that will be able to detect its owner's feelings. It will "sync with a smartphone app," and supposedly be capable of detecting "joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, boredom…" Meanwhile, Affectiva is promoting the idea that its software might be able to tell you when you've hurt people's feelings on social media, while the Dutch company Braingineers touts its alleged ability to discern how "users really feel." These proposed inventions are based on shaky understandings of human psychology which presume that emotions are concrete, detectable entities that can be reliably recognized and identified across time and space. Such a view comes from Darwin; it was resuscitated in the 1960s by psychologist Paul Ekman, and still circulates widely today (especially in Silicon Valley, as Rich Firth-Godbehere has incisively noted).