It also makes me think of alien species who might view us the same way.
It has a practical side too, our guy usually slinks off to the couch for naptime after dinner but a few months back he walked to the office and just stood in the doorway staring at us. We could instantly tell by his expression that something was wrong. He turned out to have a grass seed lodged in his armpit (Which the vet did not find! I had to remove it myself the next day).
It is fun to just watch him sleep and dream, though.
I think that's vital. Most of "Dog language" and even more of "Cat language" consists of body language. Things like pose and tension in relation to the rest of the things in the area at the moment. Dogs and cats are gifted with the ability to "speak human" enough to be understood tolerably well, but their language is demonstrably more complicated.
It said she was angry.
To be fair, it mis-identified her, and she is also a mixed-breed Asian dog so I'm not entirely surprised.
But it brings up questions for the future - what happens when AI is wrong but used as proof of something?
False positives everywhere. There was an article on HN a few weeks back about cops picking up the wrong guy, flagged by facerec. Even though the system's printout had a huge warning, "This document is not a positive identification", the detective still had the density to say, "So I guess the computer got it wrong, too."
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/24/882683463/the-computer-got-it...
You bring up a fair point, but I don't think AI is special in this regard. Imperfect sources of information synthesis (humans, naive algorithms, etc) are used all the time. Hopefully, AI should simply add one more data point from which to understand a given situation.
I'm wondering if Little Britain's "computer says no"[1] sketch is somewhat foreshadowing here. It's certainly a situation I've ran in to in several banks (globally).
I worry that the pace at which things like this will get packaged as “absolutely reliable, scientifically proven” technologies to all sorts of consumers will be far greater than the pace at which our language catches up with abstract ideas with which nuances can be widely communicated.
People with the skills to read the subtleties of others' emotions have a great advantage. This tech could make some of that skill downloadable from the app store. Using it to tell if your cat is mad at you seems like the least of it.
