3.2009

From essay on Digitalization:

So in theory just as netflix and pandora begin to understand your media tastes based on certain artificially imposed but nonetheless useful criteria (how the hell do you define jazz?), this application would attempt to understand your aesthetic taste in people- your idea of physical beauty.   As you traveled through the internet, encountering pictures of your friends and complete strangers (advertisements, blogs, facebook), you would simply tell the application who you find physically un/attractive and perhaps your best guess at a reason why ("I hate his smile" etc.). Interestingly, after some time, through recording common physical features, this formula could "understand" things about your perception of beauty that you couldn't even tell it yourself.  You might upload a picture of your mother, and label it as such. A year later the formula might realize that the characteristic bump on her nose is one of the features that most repels you in women. Or perhaps it will discover that you're attracted to people with similar eye movement, through the input of many pictures of the same people with different facial expressions which allows the computer to understand underlying muscle movement. This whole process could also be integrated with video. While functioning in real time it might find that your eyes (being watched by sensors synced to cameras on your glasses) are always drawn to men's hands. Realizing this, it might find similarities in the people you claim not to like. Although you assumed it was their personalities, it was in fact the way they all move in a jerky, neurotic way...

Understanding the way we judge  people based on their looks wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. It might clue us into the fact that we often harbor disdain for people based on illogical reasons. As a historical example, as soon as it became widely accepted that race had nothing to do with innate mental ability, we saw a decline in the amount of "scientific" treatises trying to defend such racist claims, which in turn gave the general populous less reasons with which to justify their racism. So realizing that I hate my roommate (partially) based on the trivial fact that he has my step-father's frown, I might be inclined to cut him a bit more slack. In cutting him more slack I might actually start to like him, which would establish in my mind a positive association for people with that type of face, thus allowing me to hate my step-father for what he is inside instead of simply for the way he contorts his lips. This would work in positive and negative ways accross the board having a whole range of consequences, but first and foremost it would allow us to better understand our own visual triggers. Personal attractions could be played with like never before.