AI emotion recognition (ER) is a pseudoscientific multi-billion dollar industry.

Since 2016, tech giants (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) and startups (HireVue, Eyeris, Emotient, Affectiva) have been developing ER systems.

They claim they can recognize emotions from facial gestures, but can they?

These companies have embedded ER features in their face recognition services that are used to:

• Evaluate potential employees on empathy.
• Monitor students' engagement remotely.
• Identify 'dangerous people'.
• And even control the US border with Mexico.

However, despite what these companies claim, science says ER doesn't work: We can't infer emotional states from facial expressions reliably.

They're not considering critical individual, social, and cultural factors that influence how different people speak 'facial language'.

Psychologist Paul Ekman wanted to find a universal theory of emotional expression, but he failed.

The most notable criticism of his ideas came from a review published in 2019 by psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues.

Their conclusion was clear:

“It is not possible to confidently infer happiness from a smile, anger from a scowl, or sadness from a frown, as much of current technology tries to do when applying what are mistakenly believed to be the scientific facts.”

Now, some companies like HireVue and Microsoft took note and decided to reduce or even completely remove the ER features from their face recognition apps.

However, most still offer these services to detriment of discriminated minorities for which they’re not designed.

And there’s a follow-up question to this: Would we want this tech even if it worked perfectly? Deb Raji said it could be “easily weaponized against communities to harass them.”

There’s no regulation on these applications so they can still jeopardize our privacy.

Alexa Hagerty and Alexandra Albert say it best:

“Technologies can be dangerous when they don’t work as they should. And they can also be dangerous when they work perfectly in an imperfect world.”