Technosocial risks of ideal emotion recognition technologies: A defense of the (social) value of emotional expressions

TL;DR

This paper critically examines ideal emotion recognition technologies (ERTs), arguing that their deployment risks undermining social functions of emotional expression and advocating for regulatory approaches that preserve expressive discretion.

Contribution

It challenges the assumption that increased affective transparency benefits social life by analyzing the social functions of emotional expressions and the risks posed by ideal ERTs.

Findings

Ideal ERTs threaten social cohesion by collapsing epistemic friction.

Affectively transparent systems can displace relational meaning and reduce expressive diversity.

Regulatory restraint may be justified to protect social goods related to emotional expression.

Abstract

The prospect of AI systems that I call ideal emotion recognition technologies (ERTs) is often defended on the assumption that social life would benefit from increased affective transparency. This paper challenges that assumption by examining the technosocial risks posed by ideal ERTs, understood as multimodal systems capable of reliably inferring inner affective states in real time. Drawing on philosophical accounts of emotional expression and social practice, as well as empirical work in affective science and social psychology, I argue that the appeal of such systems rests on a misunderstanding of the social functions of emotional expression. Emotional expressions function not only as read-outs of inner states, but also as tools for coordinating action, enabling moral repair, sustaining interpersonal trust, and supporting collective norms. These functions depend on a background of partial opacity and epistemic friction. When deployed in socially authoritative or evaluative contexts, ideal ERTs threaten this expressive space by collapsing epistemic friction, displacing relational meaning with technology-mediated affective profiles, and narrowing the space for aspirational and role-sensitive expressions. The result is a drift towards affective determinism and ambient forms of affective auditing, which undermine both social cohesion and individual agency. I argue that, although it is intuitive to think that increasing accuracy would legitimise such systems, in the case of ERTs accuracy does not straightforwardly justify their deployment, and may, in some contexts, provide a reason for regulatory restraint. I conclude by defending a function-first regulatory approach that treats expressive discretion and intentional emotional expression as constitutive of certain social goods, and that accordingly seeks to protect these goods from excessive affective legibility.