I'll never forget the day I heard Michio Kaku tell me
that my toilet bowl would one day know more
about me than my doctor. It was one of the most obvious examples, yet something
so benign-sounding that it's never offered as a prediction of the future.
Talking toilet bowls do not make the most clickworthy
headlines. Or do they? Maybe I'm not the most prescient clickbait writer. Maybe
Google already has a patent on the Smart Bowl. (They do,
just checked.)
More examples of environmental surveillance are already
among us, like any home security system. These systems are listening to your
whole house. They might even be listening to your footsteps with their
gait-recognition algorithm-ears.
But today we're here to talk about the ability to measure
the collective emotional signature of large groups of people. This particular study
is innocuous – it looks at the release of isoprene via our breath, and as a
result of the physical agitation that we experience when watching an intense
film.
The researchers who came up with this stuck a mass
spectrometer (basically a human offgassing detector) inside the HVAC of the
movie theater, and roll the film. As the crowd reacts, they involuntarily
release chemical signals that reveal their emotional state.
This technique is used to gauge the stress-inducing
effects of a film, to thereby classify it for various age groups. We don't want
kids watching films that are too intense. But you can easily imagine this being
used for a multitude of purposes. For example, imagine a school where every
classroom is outfitted with this equipment, monitoring the collective stress
levels in every room, ready to dispatch a security guard without the need for a
teacher to call the principal's office.
Notes:
Oct 2018, Ars
Technica
C. Stönner et al,
PLoS ONE, 2018
The
Future of Humanity, new book (2018) by Michio Kaku
Also check out his radio show on WBAI 99.5FM
Nov 2018, phys.org
Sep 2017, BBC
Post Script:
All this talk of home security does remind me of the
ancient Japanese technique of the Nightingale floorboards, which were a lo-fi
security device. The placement of tiny metal strips under the floor rub against
each other when you walk on them, chirping your arrival.
