Affectiva Guest Blog Post

Affective computing leader, Affectiva asked me to share some of my ideas about the developing emotion economy. Future Reflections on the Emotion Economy, explores how an ecosystem of emotionally aware devices and services could rapidly develop, creating an infrastucture on which still more sophisticated capabilities would be built.

This field could well be among the major drivers of the economy in years to come, both nationally and globally. Forecasts consistently show artificial intelligence-related revenues growing rapidly for the foreseeable future, with global revenues quintupling over the next five years. Forecasts for the subcategory of affective computing mirror this growth.

These are still very early days. We need only look at software like Visicalc and WordStar, the first personal computer spreadsheet and word processor developed in 1979, to catch a glimpse of how far a technology can mature in just a few decades.

The emotion economy is just one of the areas I explore in my new book, Heart of the Machine.