cybernetics

Photo: John MacDougall (Getty Images)Microsoft’s turning its back on its scientifically suspect and ethically dubious emotion recognition technology. For now, at least.In a major win for privacy advocates sounding the alarm on under-tested and invasive biometric technology, Microsoft announced it’s planning to retire its so-called “emotion recognition” detection systems from its Azure Face facial recognition services. The company will also phase out capabilities that attempt to use AI to infer identity attributes like…

A man wading in a pool of his own consciousness, surrealistically draped in the hallucinations of an artificial intelligence, shouts at me about poetry. He contorts himself with passion as his rhetoric reaches its fever pitch — you might say he ‘peaks’ — and suddenly bursts into self-awareness like a phoenix, renewed. Finally, he shakes an iPhone at me, declaring it a monument to human ambition and actuation. After watching, I feel like I’m both a tiny worm on a big hook and the master of my…