Ghost in the machine

After all, emotions are not some mystical phenomenon—they are the result of a biochemical process. Therefore, in the not too distant future a machine-learning algorithm could analyze the biometric data streaming from sensors on and inside your body, determine your personality type and your changing moods, and calculate the emotional impact that a p

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When we consider how attention is ordinarily intermingled with both perception and judgment, it’s easier to understand why the gaze of the machine may become unsettling. In the case of applications designed to take our measure, to assess our creditworthiness, say, or our fit with a prospective employer or how well we are performing, we are not mere... See more

English soccer club Manchester City will keep track of its fans’ biometrics using connected scarf embedded with a biosensor to “get a better understanding of the emotion at the heart of the world’s beautiful game.”

Whereas philosophers, psychologists, and the like search for models of human cognition and behavior, the field of artificial intelligence aims to take such models and turn them into useful tools in reality. As the salience of vibes as a way of (not) explaining experience has grown, so too have the applications of machine learning and neural network... See more

“We’re all remarkably adept,” Bogost noted, “at ascribing human intention to nonhuman things.” We do it all the time. Consider the related tendency to see human faces in non-human things, a specific subset of the phenomenon known as pareidolia, which is the tendency to assign meaning to seemingly random patterns.

there are two simple but powerful hu... See more

The evolution of our strange, extremely other-obsessed brains has brought with it weird side-effects. Human obsession with faces is so fierce we see them almost anywhere: in fire; in clouds; down spooky corridors; in toast. We sense minds everywhere too. Just as the brain models the outside world it also builds models of minds. This skill, which is

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"We are constantly negotiating with the pesky figure of the algorithm, unsure how we would have behaved if we’d been left to our own devices. No wonder we are made anxious"