That’s Left 4 Dead’s “director”

I already hate software that tries to guess my intentions from key inputs, now we're going to have the same "smart" behaviour expanded to my brain? I hope this can be turned off.

> Oh so now the hot new thing is a computing device that actively tries to guess its user’s emotional state

It also induces different states by way of imperceptible stimuli and measured the response.

The tweet got increasingly dystopian the more I read; spine-chilling stuff. Had this been about the Quest, people in this thread would be reasonably apoplectic. Imagine what Saudi Arabia or a Gambling or News app could do with this.

Fuck it, I'm going Thiel, anyone want to cofound a security startup, HMU (law enforcement experience advantageous) - we'll make the Apple Vision the best interrogation tool on earth. Fifth amendment? Pssh, the suspect won't need to say a single thing.

>It also induces different states by way of imperceptible stimuli and measured the response

Are you sure? Am I missing that part? I see this:

>Other tricks to infer cognitive state involved quickly flashing visuals or sounds to a user in ways they may not perceive, and then measuring their reaction to it.

But that doesn't say they're inducing states but rather trying to figure out the state. Trying to understand if someone is mad does not seem quite as dystopian as trying to make someone mad.

If you have the capability to measure state, and you have control over audio / visual input, then you necessarily have the ability, albeit via a probably alarmingly small number of experiments, to induce (some value of) state.

Lacking an understanding of the mechanism, I'm not sure I understand how that necessarily follows regardless of the mechanism. Completely pulling something out of my ass, imagine that they determine inserting occassional white frames results in more significant pupil dilation increases when someone is in a heightened emotional state. Sounds doable and vaguely plausible? It would allow them to infer that heightened emotional state from a quickly flashed visual in a way most users likely wouldn't perceive from a measured reaction to it. But I'm missing how it would follow that you could use the same to cause that emotional state.

> Lacking an understanding of the mechanism, I'm not sure I understand how that necessarily follows regardless of the mechanism.

Classical conditioning has been known since Pavlov and his experiment with a dog.

I dunno why people are surprised by this. We are long past the whole "autonomy of thought". Much of our decision on a day to day basis is already guided by culture society which is heavily influenced by companies.

For starters (apart from a very few outliers), if you own any Apple product, you have fallen into the trap of paying more for something that you believe is more valuable to you, but in reality, that feeling is artificially created. You aren't paying extra for features, you are paying extra because you believe that those features are worth that much, which is not your own thought.