Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway48476 | Hacker News Reader

Why is it even important to know the emotional state of passengers? Assuming it's even accurate.

That's only official part. Having cameras you can track a lot. 1. recognize people 2. track who is interacting with whom 3. track who personally pays attention to what ads on the screen 4. get some clues about health and wealth. personalized and average 5. if cameras come with microphone arrays, 'for gunshot detection', you can listen selectively. +recognition, remember? 6. Read smartphones' screens.

Now all this in hands of private company. Ready for sale.

This is really it. Private companies are paying lobbyists to fill lawmakers nonsense fake facts selling imaginary public safety value, while a huge amount of marketing value will be reaped by the private company in the hands of this public data.

It is not important, but “sentiment” was a pretty standard feature of early vision AI systems, so I guess that data was collected in the hope that it would perhaps be useful some time in the future. I used to sell customer journey tracking edge AI software, and though we never shipped sentiment in production it was a thing our customers would regularly ask for.

Super duper use case: Figure out what makes travelers the angriest. Make improvements. Measure how efficient it was.

Less duper use case: Figure out the threshold of incompetence, delays, infrastructure management, overcrowding is likely to cause a riot and try to avoid riots.

Another thing I figure they might be trying is anticipate suicides, so they can stop them before they happen. But it's probably just to sell you a grimace shake or whatever.

The incentive systems need to be aligned for us to start seeing these super duper use cases

> Less duper use case: Figure out the threshold of incompetence, delays, infrastructure management, overcrowding is likely to cause a riot and try to avoid riots.

This is what I was thinking. It's a product marketer's optimization dream: Find out the worst possible product you can make where customers will still (barely) buy it. If you can measure quantitatively how disgusted a customer is, and if you can quantify the level of disgust where he chooses not to buy, then you can find the exact cost floor for your product.

Article covers that: upsells in retail and advertising

Sentiment analysis can be pretty valuable in marketing/propaganda.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com