Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
If you’re currently in any major center in the UK, you’re being watched when you walk the streets, reports from the Financial Times and the Guardian suggest.
These are just some of the articles that have appeared recently in the Guardian about the menacing creep of facial recognition technology by technology writers such as Luke Dormehl and Tom Chivers. This is the latest in a long line of Privacy concerns regarding that most personal aspect of us, our face, and how Artificial Intelligence is being used to judge the personal characteristics of the person whose face is being looked at.
In the chapter on Emotion in my book How the Brain Thinks, also available from my website, I write about understanding facial expressions. Our face is our personal mask that rapidly conveys a lot of information and is both evocative and informative: other faces evoke an emotional response in us and also inform us of the emotional state of the other person. Very useful if you want to know whether that person in an alleyway late at night, or around the water cooler at work, is friendly or aggressive.
Some of the best work on how face conveys emotion was done by Professor Paul Ekman, Professor of Psychology at the University of of California. His work was the basis of the TV series Lie to Me starring Tim Roth in 2009. Ekman discovered how patterns of micro-expressions lasting 50 microseconds persistently conveyed seven basic emotions of anger, disgust, contempt, fear, surprise, happiness and sadness across cultures.
These are different from the ordinary real-time facial expressions we see. I also suggest in my book that these are feelings rather than the binary on-off state of base emotion.
It is a sad state of the world where something so personal is now being monetized without any one of us being able to stop it. No wonder the book 1984 was written by an Englishman.
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Dr Graham Desborough is a general practitioner, writer, mountaineer and photographer. If you like this post, you can join his mailing list at drgrahamdesborough.com or check out his book How the Brain Thinks.
