The Microsoft HoloLens Headset and the horrifying prospect of "immersive videoconferences with colleagues."

"At Windows 10 Event, Microsoft Jumps Into Augmented Reality With HoloLens Headset," the NYT enthuses but my blood ran cold when I got to the end of this paragraph:

The company has seemed adrift in recent years. But on Wednesday, it unveiled an unexpected new headset that allows interaction with holographic images, enabling people to play video games, build 3-D models and hold immersive videoconferences with colleagues.

Here's the upbeat presentation of life with holograms:



Maybe you get excited about playing video games and designing motorcycles, but I'm stuck on "immersive videoconferences with colleagues." Much as I loathe sitting through meetings and would love to be freed from the physical restraint of the closed room, I'm horrified by the prospect of strapping goggles on my head and getting locked into an immersive videoconference with a bunch of other people.

In the future, will jobs with meetings only go to people who have a bizarre capacity to look without flinching into other people's eyes? I'm assuming they're figuring out a way so that we won't be stuck looking at a person wearing goggles. But staring immersively at colleagues' faces — goggled or not — sounds like utter hell. I'm old and I can retire, and if I were young, I realize, I could pursue an occupation free of meetings. But it's not enough to drop out. I don't want the world run by the kind people who are able to put up with that inhuman style of interaction.

And while we're on the subject, you must read this New Yorker article "We Know How You Feel/Computers are learning to read emotion, and the business world can’t wait."

The software [Affdex] scans for a face; if there are multiple faces, it isolates each one. It then identifies the face’s main regions—mouth, nose, eyes, eyebrows—and it ascribes points to each, rendering the features in simple geometries. When I looked at myself in the live feed on her iPad, my face was covered in green dots. “We call them deformable and non-deformable points,” she said. “Your lip corners will move all over the place—you can smile, you can smirk—so these points are not very helpful in stabilizing the face. Whereas these points, like this at the tip of your nose, don’t go anywhere.” Serving as anchors, the non-deformable points help judge how far other points move.

Affdex also scans for the shifting texture of skin—the distribution of wrinkles around an eye, or the furrow of a brow—and combines that information with the deformable points to build detailed models of the face as it reacts. The algorithm identifies an emotional expression by comparing it with countless others that it has previously analyzed.

It seems obvious to me that if we ever do have to put up with meetings in Microsoft goggles, we'll also be seeing detailed computer-processed information about how we all feel about every little thing that is said or seen, including the data about how we all feel about every little thing that is said or seen. Ahead lies madness.