In a pretty dramatic development, it looks like your iPhone, iPad and Macbook could soon be able to read your emotions.
According to the Mirror, the ominous prediction has been sparked by Apple’s decision to buy a firm called Emotient, based in San Diego, which is currently working on A.I software that can read people’s emotions by scanning their face.
The company is one of the world leaders in emotion detection and sentiment analysis based on facial expressions, and according to their website:
The company is at the vanguard of a new wave of emotion analysis that will lead to a quantum leap in customer understanding and emotion-aware computing, primarily designed to measure ‘customers’ unfiltered emotional response to ads, content, products and customer service or sales interactions.
This means that, in the non-too-distant future, Apple products might be able to know exactly how disgusted you are by, for example, Donald Trump’s hair, or how much of a kick you get out of skateboarding dogs.
It’s not immediately clear why Apple bought Emotient, but they have confirmed the news to The Wall Street Journal saying:
Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.
However, according to The Verge, the company has recently made some other acquisitions that seem complimentary. Faceshift, a motion capture startup focused on facial analysis, and Perceptio, a company with deep-learning image recognition technology designed for mobile processors are now owned by the tech giant.
Anyone else think this is getting too creepy?
