Predictions by technologists tend to be optimistic, their timeframes often as aggressive as their ambitions, but there’s no denying the Internet’s relentless attempts to quantify are being visited upon us more and more in the physical realm. Those efforts will only increase, even if it’s anyone’s guess when an “emotion chip” will be realized. We went to the cloud, and now the cloud is coming to us. It will be seamless.

From Neil Howe’s Forbes piece about the potential of a “digital fog”:

Long considered the stuff of science fiction, AI’s great leap forward has been driven by a perfect storm of technological change. First is a growth in capabilities: Rapid advancements in computing power and falling hardware costs have made AI-related computations much cheaper to perform. Second is the advent of Big Data, which has enabled deep-learning algorithms in which the systems themselves learn bottom-up from a vast, fast-expanding universe of digital information.

Tech gurus speculate that the marriage of Big Data, the Internet of Things, and AI will eventually result in “ambient intelligence”—an ever-present digital fog in tune with our behavior and physiological state. Affectiva’s founder, Rana el Kaliouby, predicts in The New Yorker that before long, devices will have an “emotion chip” that functions unseen in the background the way that geolocation does in phones. Verizon has drafted plans for a sensor-laden media console that could scan a room and determine a driver’s license worth of information about its occupants. All these data would then determine the console’s selection of TV advertising: Signs of stress might prompt a commercial for a vacation, while cheery humming could result in more ads with upbeat messages.

What kind of mark will AI ultimately leave on society?•