This is the commercial context in which Kaliouby came to feel that it is perfectly reasonable to assert that an “emotion chip” will become the base operational unit of a new “emotion economy.” She speaks to her audiences of a chip embedded in all things everywhere, running constantly in the background, producing an “emotion pulse” each time you check your phone: “I think in the future we’ll assume that every device just knows how to read your emotions.” At least one company, Emoshape, has taken her proposition seriously. The firm, whose tagline is “Life Is the Value,” produces a microchip that it calls “the industry’s first emotion synthesis engine,” delivering “high performance machine emotion awareness.” The company writes that its chip can classify twelve emotions with up to 98 percent accuracy, enabling its “artificial intelligence or robot to experience 64 trillion possible distinct emotional states.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 900