Why I Am Buying a Mask

A long train journey provides an opportunity to catch up on old New Yorkers. In a slightly too lengthy article on developments in artificial intelligence, in the issue of 19 January, I just read this passage::

"By scanning facial action units, computers can now outperform most people in distinguishing social smiles from those triggered by spontaneous joy, and in differentiating between faked pain and genuine pain. They can determine if a patient is depressed. Operating with unflagging attention, they can register expressions so fleeting that they are unknown even to the person making them. 

[Its co-inventor] often emphasizes that this technology can read only facial expressions, not minds, but Affdex is marketed as a tool that can make reliable inferences about people’s emotions—a tap into the unconscious."

Right - that is the last you'll see of me (inasmuch as you have seen anything of me to begin with) - I'm off to scour the Internet for a full-face mask.