• WORLD VIEW

Time to regulate AI that interprets human emotions

The pandemic is being used as a pretext to push unproven artificial-intelligence tools into workplaces and schools.
By
  1. Kate Crawford

    1. Kate Crawford is a research professor at University of Southern California Annenberg in Los Angeles and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research in New York. Her latest book is Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Twitter: @katecrawford

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During the pandemic, technology companies have been pitching their emotion-recognition software for monitoring workers and even children remotely. Take, for example, a system named 4 Little Trees. Developed in Hong Kong, the program claims to assess children’s emotions while they do classwork. It maps facial features to assign each pupil’s emotional state into a category such as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise and fear. It also gauges ‘motivation’ and forecasts grades. Similar tools have been marketed to provide surveillance for remote workers. By one estimate, the emotion-recognition industry will grow to US$37 billion by 2026.

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Nature 592, 167 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00868-5

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