CAN MACHINES
EVER TRULY
UNDERSTAND
EMOTIONS?

How do you feel about machines tracking your emotions? Excited… or worried?

Imagine if your phone could sense that you’re feeling upset and anxious, and it responded by recommending a meditation app. The rapid rise of Emotion Recognition Technology (ERT) means this could soon be a reality.

Feelings are already big business – just look at the advertising industry. If AI-powered tech can learn to recognise and respond to our emotions, the potential will be huge. But so are the concerns.

For every positive application, like helping people with autism, there could be many more downsides if unscrupulous organisations were able to exploit this new source of data.

And that’s before we get to the BIG question: can this technology actually work? The science around emotion-tracking is highly contentious, and some believe that human emotions are far too complex and mysterious to ever be understood by machines.