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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

This quote is inaccurate. The actual wording is: "the placing on the market, the putting into service for this specific purpose, or the use of AI systems to infer emotions of a natural person in the areas of workplace and education institutions, except where the use of the AI system is intended to be put in place or into the market for medical or safety reasons;" and it links to https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/recital/44/ for rationale.

So, this targets the use case of a third party using AI to detect the emotional state of a person.

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We need to profile your every thought and emotion. Don't worry though, it's for medical or safety reasons only. Same for your internet history... You know, terrorism and all. Can't have that.

I can definitely see use cases where cameras that detect distressed people can help prevent harm from them and others.

Stop resisting! We detect you are depressed and will take action!

I know of at least one person whose life was saved because of wearable techs ability to recognize when someone is undergoing emotional stress.

Do I want cameras all over society tracking emotions? Probably not. But there’s a baby somewhere in that bath water.

Unable to unagree with doubleplusgood reasons

Is this just based on hypothetical scenario they sat in a room coming up with or has such a thing been tried and harmed people?

While this is not primarily emotion, I hope it would squarely be covered by it: https://bigthink.com/the-present/attention-headbands/

I once tried building a Macbook app which lowers my music volume when I'm not smiling, to try to stimulate more happy emotions (forcing yourself to smile induces happy feelings)

Then I started thinking how this could be used in restaurants to see if waiters smile to the people they are serving Or in customer service (you can actually hear it when people smile on the phone)

Then I realised that this kind of tech would definitely lead to abuse

(btw that's not the reason I didn't build it, it was just not that easy to build)

We cannot extend your work contract, based on your performance the last week. You definitely did not smile enough. Our systems indicate, that you were also not happy enough a sufficient portion of the time you worked.

Something like that has already been implemented before in a corporate environment: "Canon put AI cameras in its Chinese offices that only let smiling workers inside" (https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/17/22538160/ai-camera-smile-...)

This is an interesting idea (the first one..) and I suspect it'd be quite easy to build now. Someone posted a web app recently that reminds you to blink (iff you don't), and it was incredibly accurate for me, running fully in the browser.

I believe the challenge was to access the volume settings from a browser web page (I wanted it to be a web app)

Not sure if that’s solved

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