“How do we get humans to trust in all this AI we’re building?”, asked Affectiva CEO Rana El-Kaliouby, at the prestigious NYT New Work Summit at Half Moon Bay last week. She had already assumed a consensus that trust-building was the correct way to proceed, and went on to suggest that, rather than equipping users and consumers with the skills and tools to scrutinize AI, we should instead gently coax them into placing more unearned faith in data-driven artifacts.

But how would this be accomplished? Well, Affectiva are “on a mission to humanize technology”, drawing upon machine and deep learning to “understand all things human.” All things human, El-Kaliouby reliably informed us, would include our emotions, our cognitive state, our behaviors, our activities. Note: not to sense, or to tentatively detect, but to understand those things in “the way that humans can.”

Grandiose claims, indeed.

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