Digital Happiness
With the exponential growth of technology and the ever-increasing speed of the digitalization of our world, it has become a standard procedure to take technology into account when examining social issues. People know that technology has pervaded their lives. Be it shopping, following world events, forming an opinion, communicating, organizing financial affairs and even finding a life partner. The promises from technology are high; humanity-saving claims run rampant in tech. But people see threats as well. Security-breaches, fake-news, cyberwar, and privacy-violations are now common news and no longer just 1984 fantasies. Technology is everywhere and the impact is complex and dualistic. No wonder that people are asking the logical question: ‘Does all this technology makes me happier?’ And the customer stands not alone in his quest for happiness. Employees bring the same desires to their workplace and with good reason. Shawn Achor, author of the bestseller ‘The Happiness Advantage’, analysed over 200 scientific studies on happiness and concludes that happy employees “have higher levels of productivity, produce higher sales, perform better in leadership positions, and receive higher performance ratings and higher pay. They also enjoy more job security and are less likely to take sick days, to quit, or become burned out. Happy CEO’s are more likely to lead teams of employees who are both happy and healthy, and who find their work climate conducive to high performance.” It seems there is a willingness among some tech leaders as well to contribute to our well-being on the long term. Elon Musk and Sam Altman (president of Y Combinator) advocate for experiments with Universal Basic Income, Bill Gates for robot taxes, Mo Gawdat (Chief Business Officer at Google’s [X]) is on a personal mission to make 10 million people happy, and Mark Zuckerberg gives Harvard’s class of 2017 a lesson on his meaning of life: “We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful.” Zuckerberg then bemoaned the current state of income inequality: he finds it ludicrous that he is so disproportionately wealthy compared to his old Harvard classmates.From reviews to reading emotions
![Emotion recognition](https://labs.sogeti.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/06/emotion-recognition-300x209.png)
In Conclusion
The conclusion for now is that:- Happiness is becoming humanity’s explicit goal (instead of only GDP for instance).
- Technology will help measuring happiness (and maybe increase our happiness obsession?)
- Companies will be reviewed through this happiness perspective: “Does your business makes me happier?”
Nice blog on very relevant developments. I think you are right in stating that the pursuit of happiness will lead to more attention to emotional responses of humans and sentient machines.
However at the end you provide only one link to a emotion reading experience. I think it would be nice to add another link, to the FaceReader software of Vicar Vision, an Amsterdam based AI company. The FaceReader software has a strong background in emotion theory and is used in a lot of scientific research but hasn’t made it yet to the general public.
Keep on the good work!
Wow, that’s an interesting company..! Their FaceReader looks good, and also their other projects such as WPSS, R3D3, and Concort:
About their Concort-project: “Consumers are continuously exposed to persuasive communication that tries to make emotional appeals. Ultimately the goal of ads and sales pitches is to elicit desire or fear. The current project aims to explore the emotional characteristics of consumer competence. Competent consumers should be able to resist persuasive emotional appeals, at least long enough to evaluate the long-term desirability of the products offered.”
–> In order to become ‘digital happy’, you have to build new characteristics, e.g. 1) to resist the growing persuasive power of digital technologies, or 2) to be able to reflect upon your online behaviour and see the connections between your online and offline life, 3) etc.
Thank you for showing me Vicar Vision Adri :).