The key to affective computing, Picard argued, was to render both conscious and unconscious emotion as observable behavior for coding and calculation. A computer, she reasoned, would be able to render your emotions as behavioral information. Affect recognition, as she put it, is “a pattern recognition problem,” and “affect expression” is pattern synthesis. The proposition was that “computers can be given the ability to recognize emotions as well as a third-person human observer.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 889