Brendan Sinclair
Just found an all-timer patent application that might go up on Context-Free Patent Art at some point, but I thought it would be fun to walk through it with a little context here. So let's look at the patent for a "Digital Telepathy Ecosystem Method and Devices."
It starts off talking about monitoring a person's emotional state by collecting heart rate, temp, O2 saturation, galvanic skin response, etc.
Then it moves to empathy.
Brendan Sinclair
And just in case they weren't collecting a scary amount of personal information as it was, they also want to use this for innovations in the exciting field of teledildonics.
Eaton
@BrendanSinclair like, a decade ago I roughed out a tool to do this with digital communications stuff. Automate “how ya doin’?” checkins, sentiment analysis on slack (yammer and irc at the time) etc.
It took about 10m of roughing out next steps to realize no amount of good intentions would save it, and we (myself, the r&d team I was working with) torched it and moved on.
It’s just such an unmitigated “now you have emotional panopticon” horror show
Brendan Sinclair
One idea seems to be that you could connect users so that if, for example, someone you were close to suddenly was having a Very Bad Time, you could reach out to check in on them.
I'm skeptical that emotional state can be properly inferred from physical metrics with a useful degree of accuracy and generally don't like efforts to boil down the mystery of human existence to numbers, but OK, maybe someone could find that helpful?
Brendan Sinclair
@eaton Thank you for your lack of service!
Eaton
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