CURMUDGUCATION: Amazon Wants To Read Your Heart

CURMUDGUCATION: Amazon Wants To Read Your Heart

Amazon Wants To Read Your Heart

One of the frontiers in creepy computer intelligence is the pursuit of software that can read the details of your face, your breathing, your eyeballs, and out of those details, construct a computer-generated window into your very heart and soul.

Some of the attempts are laughable, like the NWEA feature that presumes to know how engaged and focused your students are based on wait time for answering questions on a computerized standardized test. Some are ambitious, like the project that claims the ability to "read" a whole batch of different emotions as displayed on human faces.

But this is one of those areas where it pays to look outside the education arena, because there are so many different applications for this sort of Big Brothery technocreeping. And when a major player like Amazon decides to join the biz, attention should be paid. Last week, Bloomberg served notice:

Amazon.com Inc. is developing a voice-activated wearable device that can recognize human emotions.

Bloomberg says it has seen internal memos, and that the wrist-worn gadget is a collaboration between various creepy divisions of Amazon that already work on the Fire phone, the Echo speaker, and Alexa. The idea is that the device will be able to "discern the wearer's emotional CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Amazon Wants To Read Your Heart