Researchers have discovered a way to stare artificial intelligence deep into the windows of humans’ souls and emerge with a score card on personality as it pertains to four traits: neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness.
They were also able to gauge levels of curiosity by tracking eye activity.
Eye-gazing — technology’s next venture toward omniscience.
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“We tracked eye movements of 42 [study] participants while they ran an errand on a university campus and subsequently assessed their personality traits using well-established questionnaires,” the researchers explained, in their “Eye Movements During Everyday Behavior Predict Personality Traits” study.
The study, published in April, was conducted by researchers with the Machine Learning and Robotics Lab at the University of Stuttgart; with the School of Psychology at the University of South Australia; with the School of Psychology at Flinders University in Australia; and with the Perceptual User Interfaces Group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrucken, Germany.
“Using a state-of-the-art machine learning method and a rich set of features encoding different eye movement, we were able to reliably predict four of the Big Five personality traits,” the scientists went on.
The gist of the finding is that people with similar personality traits generally move their eyes in response to various stimuli in similar ways.
An optimist, for instance, doesn’t spend as much time gazing at images with negative content — say, a photograph of skin cancer — than a pessimist.
This bit of predictive technology doesn’t come in a bubble.
Artificial intelligence researchers have been working toward accurate personality readers for some time. IBM Watson — the same machine that made international headlines for winning against human competitors on the game show “Jeopardy” in 2011 — sprung forth a Personality Insights service in 2015 that measures characteristics based on text. Plug in a 100-word email or blog post, and out Watson spits your personality.
In 2017, DeepSense by Frrole gave corporations the technology tools to “make predictions” about prospective employees — to actually determine how they’d behave in certain situations by analyzing their social media activity.
Meanwhile, Stanford researchers actually found in a study published in January of 2015 that computers are far better judges of personality than humans — even when the humans were good friends or colleagues.
Well and good. Interesting stuff. Until the technology’s moved from the lab into the real world, that is.
“This research provides opportunities to develop robots and computers so that they can become more natural, and better at interpreting human social signals,” said UniSA’s Tobias Loetscher, in Science Daily.
Let the applications begin.
Teachers, grab your trade school lists. Advertisers and marketers, start your engines. Human resources’ folk, hiring managers, put away those Caliper Profiles. That sound of cheering in the background? That’s the mass applause of police and intel agents as they contemplate their newfound powers to predict crime.
These are not simply downsides to this artificial intelligence development. These should be cease and desist decisions to develop and exploit for sale this application of A.I. Once that genie’s out of the bottle, saturating its way into Commercial Land, there’s no putting it back.
It’s bad enough that cameras are being mounted on street corners and crossings with increasing frequency throughout the United States. But add A.I. to these cameras to track eye movements of pedestrians? That’s just a police state, pure and simple.
That’s just textbook example police state stuff.
First appeared at The Washington Times.
