'Here's Looking At You, Kid': Interactive Entertainment In The Age Of Machine-Readable Humans

Abstract

Today, while you're watching television, your television is watching you too. With the introduction of cameras, microphones, and other sensors integrated with our networked, smart TV sets and mobile devices, opportunities arise that go well beyond videocommunication, gesture-based interaction, or consumer segmentation. Machines are learning to recognise human identity, contexts, activities, and emotions, and your TV is no exception. Armed with such knowledge, new horizons for personalised, interactive and immersive entertainment as well as marketing emerge. At the same time, some such proposals may be at variance with human values many of us hold dear, including privacy, trust, and control. In addition, with increasingly powerful personal profiling and machine understanding of humans, the potential psychological consequences of breaches in cybersecurity (e.g., hacking, phishing) increase in similar measure. In this keynote talk, I will highlight some of the progress in machine understanding of human behavior and emotions, its potential in interactive and personalised entertainment, as well as some legitimate concerns in terms of human values and human psychology as we enter the Age of Machine-Readable Humans.