ThinkTWENTY20

By Ricardo Rodil
Ricardo Rodil leads the capital markets advisory services division at Crowe Macro (Brazil).

Every time I try to understand or analyze a very complex event,  I usually try to reduce the problem to its essential elements – a sort of inverted zoom lens. I know that the devil is in the details, but I need to have some distance from them. So, I formulate extreme hypotheses, thinking about all the possible/plausible results (from 8 thru 8,000, as we say in Brazil). And, of capital importance, I know I need to keep my mind open to all possibilities. Today, I want to share with you where my latest thoughts have led me, about where and how technology is progressing and how that is transforming our lives.

In a non-random survey of some 915 innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists were asked by Pew Research to consider what life will be like in 2025 in the wake of the outbreak of the global pandemic. Overall they saw life being made worse for many people because of the spread of mis-information and authoritarianism and the fact people will become a lot more reliant on technology, which will serve to widen the economic divide.

One of the more interesting applications of AI being developed is that of detecting human emotions. This is a remarkable idea, since computers being just a machine, they are totally lacking in emotion. So how can they detect emotion?