The program of emotional rendition began innocently enough with MIT Media Lab professor Rosalind Picard and the new field of computer science that she called “affective computing.” She was among the first to recognize the opportunity for a computational system to automate the analysis of Ekman’s facial configurations and correlate micro-expressions with their emotional causality. She aimed to combine facial expression with the computation of vocal intonation and other physiological signals of emotion that could be measured as behavior. In 1997 she published Affective Computing, which posited a practical solution to the idea that some emotions are available to the conscious mind and can be expressed “cognitively” (“I feel scared”), whereas others may elude consciousness but nevertheless be expressed physically in beads of sweat, a widening of the eyes, or a nearly imperceptible tightening of the jaw.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 888