7 minute read
Facebook has expanded the reaction line for the post from well-known “Like” to five more graphical responses, like Love, Haha, Wow Sad or Angry. More emotional options to express self have been required by Facebook users for years. Emotions are being digitalised and measured and the largest tech giants are the captains on this digital ship. How digitalised and artificially triggered human emotions will change the way we live?
Emotions[nbsp]
matter
Advancement in brain science has proven that human decision-making process is based on the emotions. Nowadays, the Emotionomics, term implemented by Dan Hill, investigates the role of emotions in economics. According to him, and many would agree, the competitive advantage can be achieved by both, rational and emotional endorsements. Social sciences have a continues debate on rationality and its subjectivity due to human emotions involvement in the decision making. However, everyone should agree that emotions matter.Experts claim that 90 percent of all purchasing decisions are made unconsciously. “A major part of our brain is busy with automatic processes, not conscious thinking. A lot of emotions and less cognitive activities happen,” says behavioral economist George Loewenstein.
Experts claim that 90 percent of all purchasing decisions are made unconsciously. “A major part of our brain is busy with automatic processes, not conscious thinking. A lot of emotions and less cognitive activities happen,” says behavioral economist George Loewenstein.
All this statistic is common knowledge. People know that positive emotions make them feel better and happier. However, it is getting harder and harder to get positive emotions in the overcrowded public transport, polluted mega-city, stressed fast-moving lifestyle and etc. The shortage on happiness and relaxation creates a demand on the achieving “nirvana”, whether with the use of medicine or virtual reality diving. The addiction to social media, tracking the numbers of likes and posting only the surreal positiveness of one’s life has been revealed worldwide. The perfect images of someone’s life oppress his “social friends”. Nevertheless, realising this problem has not solved it. The other way around, it will create the new market for emotions removing the boundaries of what is permitted.
Virtually
dead
With the multiple methods of triggering different emotions, Virtual Reality is arriving fast into the life. HTC brings to our world new experiences using its VR headset with immersive theatre Virtually Dead. Promising to terrify visitors with one-hour long trip of terror, amaze and wonders, in a secret location in East London, tickets for the event were fully booked in couple of days after the announcement. Jon Goddard, Head of European VR Marketing at HTC says: “By combining our VR with immersive theatre, we aim to introduce new audiences to HTC Vive before our April launch. We have produced something that showcases VR in a whole new light and will attract people outside of the usual circles that would typically be interested in a VR event.” The project seems to be intriguing and unusual. If there is a desire to survive “Virtually Dead” this year in London, there must be enough patience to be on the long waiting list.
Quantified
self
Researching the emotional side of our brains people want to be able to measure the impact of events to their well-being. How to find out what or who causes more stress, whom should we avoid or spend more time with? Measuring the heartbeat data might give an answer. Researchers and artists[nbsp]Kyle McDonald and Lauren McCarthy have launched the app which goes together with the heart rate bracelet monitor called “pplkpr”. The app allows users to track and manage the social interactions in real time. The program will analyse the data and give the user the feedback on his or hers emotional state. Digitalised interaction might sound tempting. However, the existence of such technologies raises the questions of ethics and privacy: where will the personal data go and who will have access to it?
Tech giants
digitalising
human
According to Albert Mahrabian studies, 55 percent of communication comes through facial expressions, 38 percent of communication gets accomplished by a tone of voice, and only the rest 7 percent relies on the verbal exchange. Apple, the world’s largest and innovative tech giant, sets a new height of the technological development. Apple buys AI Startup, which can read facial expressions and emotions. This artificial intelligence will be able to recognise the mood and sentiments of the user. Isn’t it a dream of the marketing professionals to know exactly which strings the advertisement pulls?
Apple is not alone in the game. Google and Facebook are working on the similar facial recognition technologies. No doubt, national security programs have made some breakthrough in the related technologies keeping it “top secret” for now. Once the emotions and facial expressions will be digitalised and will contribute to the Big Data, more research towards human behaviour will be available.
Who is leading the deep-learning movement? It is not hard to guess and make the list of three: Google, Facebook and Microsoft. The companies with the largest and most solid data sets are full hands in researching deep machine learning. Moreover, it is the companies, which have resources to hire well-educated and experienced personnel, PhDs from all over the world committed to future development; and which have the massive, powerful machinery for deep-learning utilization. For now, computers still cannot imitate the brain and replicate the human algorithms. Also, deep-learning is hardly implemented into mobile technologies where we would like to locate the research programs. Nevertheless, considering allocated resources, a breakthrough is not far off.
Financially unconstrained
projects for the sake
of humanity
Humanity should not forget that when the power to read people’s mind gets in the hands of profit-oriented people the danger of privacy invasion and mind control is born. For example, Facebook has opened FAIR (Facebook Artificial Intelligence) open-source hardware department. Using the large publicly available data sets combined with new powerful computers and increased servers, Facebook intends to contribute to Open Compute Project for the benefit of others. Sounds a bit tricky, as Facebook conducts many ethically questioned experiments with online human interaction on their website platform.
Realising the potential and threat of the artificial intelligence, Ellon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and others has established a non-profit OpenAI research company. They promise to provide strictly academic outcomes in a format of papers, journal articles, available[nbsp]fo everyone. Financially unconstrained OpenAi recruits the brightest minds from Silicon Valley and utilized heavy machinery. “Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible” says OpenAI website. Fingers crossed for the success of the project. However, looking at the history of the founders career, they should not let us down.
#artificial intelligence #virtual reality #emotimarket #digitalising emotions #future trends
