The A.I. "Gaydar" Study and the Real Dangers of Big Data

Every face does not tell a story; it tells thousands of them. Over evolutionary time, the human brain has become an exceptional reader of the human face--computerlike, we like to think. A viewer instinctively knows the difference between a real smile and a fake one. In July, a Canadian study reported that college students can reliably tell if people are richer or poorer than average simply by looking at their expressionless faces. Scotland Yard employs a team of "super-recognizers" who can, from a pixelated photo, identify a suspect they may have seen briefly years earlier or come across in a mug shot.