FTA: "When Picard and el Kaliouby were calibrating their prototype, they were surprised to find that the average person only managed to interpret, correctly, 54 per cent of Baron-Cohen's expressions on real, non-acted faces. This suggested to them that most people - not just those with autism - could use some help sensing the mood of people they are talking to. "People are just not that good at it," says Picard. The software, by contrast, correctly identifies 64 per cent of the expressions."
I kind of wonder how they did this testing. Much of the information we get about a person's mood is from what context there is (far more than comes from what's on their faces). There are people who cry out of joy, but if I saw a picture of one of these people, I'm sure it would look like sadness to me.
Further, I don't like the sound of a future where people stop talking to other people because a light starts blinking.
However, for the purposes of autism research and development, this is good. Better than good - this is excellent. I really hope there will be more research in this area, for the purpose of helping those who can't communicate well. (I suppose that contradicts what I said above. Perhaps there is a particular scale on which to rank necessity of aid in communication?)
It makes sense that people's ability to detect true emotion is capped, though. It's useful to be able to successfully fake an emotion. Social skills are an arms race. 50-50 is somewhat lower than I'd expected in terms of the skill of the average person, but I'd be astonished (and disconcerted) if emotional detection was at 100%. Being able to lie is just too damn useful.
17/20 although I thought I had them all. Eyebrows don't move if you're faking. Also the way they returned to stone cold normality after the smile gave it away.
> Further, I don't like the sound of a future where people stop talking to other people because a light starts blinking.
I guess most people would become much better `raw' observers if they underwent a little training and got some feedback.
(I remember the study that some scientist did about clothing and the point in the monthly fertility cycle of women. After a while as a side effect the researchers became experts at guessing the point in the menstrual cycle.)
I agree, the part on the little red light telling you not to talk was disconcerting at best. I can't help but envision a slippery-slope wherein soon computers are regulating all aspects of our conversations, at which point they cease to ever be meaningful.
Open question: why do you feel computers regulating conversation is worse than computers regulating writing (from spell checking via grammar advice up to style advice)? It's not like you can't ignore either system.
Spell checking would be the equivalent of correcting pronunciation. I would hardly mind that. It's more the idea of computers controlling the actual flow and similarly the content of the conversation.
Being a certified autist with the additional bonus of having very bad eyesight, I can't stress enough how important and useful developments like these can be.
I am extremely poor at having face to face conversations. Mostly because any kind of body language completely escapes me. This has caused numerous situations of miss-communication and generally makes any kind of meaningful interaction with a human being unreliable at best.
Having access to an aid like this will certainly help improve matters for me and anyone trying to have a conversation with me.
I lived there for five years, and recently moved away.
Plus: highest concentration of intelligence on the Eastern seaboard. It's pretty spectacular.
Minus:
Warning: what follows is my own opinion based on my own experience, and YMMV, but:
Coldness. People don't really connect. They don't really have friends. They don't "hang out," or if they do the conversations are either technical or about the weather. Try to talk to someone about anything emotional, or far out, or speculative, or... anything other than brainy topics or the weather... and you're very, very weird and people look at you funny and go back to the weather.
For the first two years I lived there I thought it was me. Then I had this friend who lived there... total social butterfly, way more than me. After he'd lived there for five years, he had more friends in New York than in Boston. He moved to New York. I went and visited him and after being there for three months he had like twenty friends.
The entire Boston area is cold and anti-social, especially the MIT/Harvard nexus.
Somehow I don't think the specs are going to help, because I don't think it has anything to do with social ability. I got the distinct impression that being friendly was considered a mark of low social class.
Funny, I also lived in Cambridge for 5 years (mostly the Inman area) and had the exact opposite impression, and in fact, I'm in the process of trying to find a way to leave DC because I think it's cold in exactly the same way you describe. I pretty frequently find myself wishing I was back in Cambridge.
I've lived ~3 months in many different US cities (DC, Chicago, Seattle, Austin, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Boston) and DC was my least favorite. Everyone there is obsessed with their proximity to the Washington power structure, which is a cold organization full of boring people.
I'm not the most social person to begin with, so I gave it a lot of time, but I just totally failed to make any non-work friends because of stuff like that. I've been here for ~4 years and am so ready to get out West. Of course, it's never as easy to move that far as you'd want it to be.
I remember in Cambridge I could swing downstairs to the neighborhood bar, find a stranger, and strike up a conversation. Maybe it didn't work half as well as I am recalling, but even then, it was better than DC, where it always turns to "where do you work?" And "a startup" has only slightly more cachet than "I'm unemployed."
From a professional standpoint moving here has been great, but from a personal point of view, I think it's the biggest I've made.
I sometimes wonder if there is some kind of random stochastic effect that's related to where on the social graph you connect initially in a city that determines this outcome.
But I really, really tried. So did my friend, who was far more outgoing than me. Neither of us were able to meet very many people in Boston, or ever to feel comfortable there.
I love having an ordinary day, maybe taking a ride on the T and overhearing a conversation about quantum mechanics or cryptology. Cambridge really does have a unique culture.
While I agree with your general sentiment (I love living in Cambridge, right between MIT and Harvard), it would be a mistake to get too wrapped up in tech and ignore what has historically and still is arguably Boston's greatest resource: teaching hospitals/medicine.
It always seems to take companies that originate from the MIT media lab a long time to get from cool demo to something hackers/the general public can play with.
I kind of wonder how they did this testing. Much of the information we get about a person's mood is from what context there is (far more than comes from what's on their faces). There are people who cry out of joy, but if I saw a picture of one of these people, I'm sure it would look like sadness to me.
Further, I don't like the sound of a future where people stop talking to other people because a light starts blinking.
However, for the purposes of autism research and development, this is good. Better than good - this is excellent. I really hope there will be more research in this area, for the purpose of helping those who can't communicate well. (I suppose that contradicts what I said above. Perhaps there is a particular scale on which to rank necessity of aid in communication?)