Such technology, she said, was in use all over the world, from Europe to the US and China. Taigusys, a company that specialises in emotion recognition systems and whose main office is in Shenzhen, says it has used them in settings ranging from care homes to prisons, while according to reports earlier this year, the Indian city of Lucknow is planning to use the technology to spot distress in women as a result of harassment – a move that has met with criticism, including from digital rights organisations.
While Hagerty said emotion recognition technology might have some potential benefits these must be weighed against concerns around accuracy, racial bias, as well as whether the technology was even the right tool for a particular job.
Unforeseen consequences of new technologies put UK at risk
Lords committee told that the risks associated with various emerging digital technologies must be assessed together, with input from UK citizens, if the government is to avoid ‘siloisation’ of fundamentally interconnected problems
Share this item with your network: By Published: 14 Jan 2021 11:31
The UK government must focus on the relationships between different digital technologies when assessing their potential risks, which would help avoid the “siloisation” of fundamentally interconnected problems, expert witnesses have told a House of Lords committee.
Giving evidence to the Risk Assessment and Risk Planning Committee – which gathered virtually on 13 January to hear about the most significant technological risks facing society today – a number of witnesses told the Lords that the government’s current risk assessment framework failed to account for the interplay between different technologies, a
Unfortunately, it’s precisely our short-term thinking that could mean life is far worse for future generations than it might otherwise be. How can we combat this deeply embedded short-termism and get people to think about centuries, millennia, and beyond? (File photo: Marco Xu/Unsplash)
“Where do you see yourself in five years?” It’s a classic job interview question, designed to probe your level of ambition and aspiration. And it probes about as far ahead as many of us are likely to think: with so many distractions in the here and now, so many crises and challenges and opportunities that will arise, and so much that seems likely to change, who can meticulously sit and plan for decades ahead?
Jeremy Gaunt / Creative Commons
Are we on the verge of societal collapse? We tend to worry about the big explosive stuff like nuclear war, asteroids, and solar flares when we consider end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios. The reality is that most fallen civilizations gradually decline over many decades with a banality that can barely register.
We often remember the decline of civilizations as the fault of poor leaders or natural disasters but it s more like death from a thousand cuts from conditions like inequality, corruption, and political dysfunction. That s (partly) what happened to the Roman Empire.
And most civilizations don t collapse. They adapt and transform and take their culture with them. The Maya civilization is the archetype of a “collapsed” civilization, ingrained through popular and scholarly literature. That s not really what happened and millions of Maya descendants are alive to talk about it.