Nothing to fear except hackfear itself

Nikolay talked about the #HACKFEAR hackathon  that he had recently been to. It was organized by Karen Palmer, a film maker and parkour practitioner. She is interested in fear – Parkour is at its essence about fear management. She discussed a future in which technology has gone bad – for example, if you wanted by the police and you get into an automated car, it will take you straight to the police station and instead wants to use technology to help guide and empower people.

She has an art piece called “Riot” – which is a webcam watching you, while watching a video, and attempting to identify the emotion that you’re portraying using a neural network. If you show “appropriate” responses for the situation, then the video progresses; if you show inappropriate responses, then the video ends and you have as many attempts as you need.

At the hack, most of the hacking was about concepts, rather than fully working products. Nikolay’s group looked at fear of public speaking; taking the technology from Riot to analyze your posture and speech (e.g. how much you say ‘um’) to help provide feedback on your speaking.

Another team used a VR system to analyze your emotions and show you “scary” things, as exposure therapy to them. other teams that tackledmanagement of memory loss, fear of self expression as well as fear management through journals or improvenent of communication for early school-leavers.

We also discussed other types of fear, such as writers’ block, and acrophobia; and the difference between climbing a ladder, versus jumping off a cliff with a paragliding harness attached. While the latter should be scarier, it’s not, because you know that you have a harness.

Karen Palmer has TED talks about this topic.