In the 19th century, the Veronese Cesare Lombroso developed a theory about the relationship between criminals and their faces that for a long time was used to determine whether a person had evil tendencies or not. For him all factions have a meaning. The shape of the ears and the jaw, and that of the skulls: whether they were big or small or asymmetrical… He defined six types of malefactors that for lack of space we will not detail in this column.
The face is the mirror of the soul, they say. Now the saying is useful again for the enjoyment of political scientists. Beyond writing you an article or drawing a house with trees better than you could, AI now guesses your political ideology just by looking at your face. The American Psychologist magazine publishes details of this new facial identification tool. By the characteristics of the nose or the chin, it can tell if you are conservative or progressive. Progressives have the thinnest and smallest faces. Conservatives have it thicker and rounder.
What is prejudice? Probably. In TV3’s Està passant, Elisenda Carod presents the space El joc dels prejudices, where even the most uneducated person – myself – is able to guess the characteristics of the three people who participate. Prejudices are frowned upon, but they help a lot in life. I don’t know anyone who, when they get on the subway, doesn’t try to imagine what the people around them are like in private. Tomorrow, election day, if you are going to vote, you will probably try to deduce who those ahead of you in the queue will vote for or those who swarm around the school without knowing which table is theirs, as if it were not the same as always.
Soon you won’t have to go to vote. From the face you spend, the AI ??will know which ballot you want to put in the ballot box. Tomorrow there will still be some, from ballot boxes. Take advantage of them; or not, if you are already tipsy. The AI ??would have deduced that too, by the face.
