This content originally appeared on HackerNoon and was authored by Susie Liu
\ I recently stumbled upon two new AI gadgets that made me laugh, then made me want to cry.
\ Pre-orders are now being accepted for ==Moflin==—think Furby meets guinea pig—an AI-powered emotional support pet that offers all the warmth and fuzzy feelings of a real animal, minus the burden of feeding, walking, or, heaven forbid, actually caring for it. Casio, the mastermind behind this elongated Totoro furball, claims Moflin learns your habits, responds to your mood, and offers companionship without any of the messy, real-life hassle. It’s the ultimate commitment-free relationship—complete with a charging dock and the emotional depth of a rice cooker. ==The average robot dog simulates affection; Moflin evolves emotionally (or so the press release says)==. As you grow more dependent on it, Moflin gets better at mimicking love. But while a real pet might actually love you back, Moflin’s job is to serve up a perfectly tailored reflection of your own emotions. It’s like having a sentient throw pillow—just enough warmth to fool you into thinking you’re experiencing connection, when you’re just cuddling your own ego, wrapped in synthetic fur and a shiny tech shell.
\ Moflin’s gunning for the absurdity crown but only manages to snag the runner-up sash. Launched in September, the ==Elemind Headband== is an AI-powered contraption that promises on demand sleep. While the likes of Muse S gently monitors your mind like a Fitbit for your brain, ==Elemind goes full Dr. Strange on you, using neurosensory stimulation to bend your brainwaves into submission==. Want to relax? Just slap on this headband, lie back, and let it Jedi-mind-trick your brain into bliss, because even managing your own stress has become so last decade. It’s relaxation for the modern, overburdened human—because evidently, we’re now too tired to even let our own brains unwind.
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We can mock and ridicule a puffball of algorithmic love or a headband that promises to be your ticket to becoming a modern-day monk, but once the laughs are over, we should ask: ==Why? In this goal-driven world, nothing is a fluke.==
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Selling Sanity: The Allure of Emotional Outsourcing
\ This demand isn’t driven by laziness. Laziness is a nice, palatable excuse. What we’re really doing is staging a mass emotional exodus. Vulnerability, intimacy, patience? They’re heavy. They require effort, discomfort, time. Why struggle through the very experiences that define human existence when you can bypass them altogether? Moflin doesn’t just replace a pet; it replaces the unpredictability of affection. Elemind doesn’t help you meditate; it hijacks your brainwaves to make sure you never have to learn how.
\ ==We’re not paying for convenience—we’re paying to avoid ourselves.==
\
Let me usher you in to the age emotional outsourcing, where we’re turning dodging life’s messiness into an industry.
\ Neuroscientists have been warning us about this for years. Our minds are wired to avoid emotional discomfort, a phenomenon psychologists call ==affective dissonance==. Give the brain a chance to sidestep something unpleasant, and it’ll sprint towards that exit like it’s the last open bar at a wedding. When we’re exposed to a chronic loop of uncertainty—like a smoothie of climate disasters, political chaos, and a global pandemic for good measure—this instinct becomes turbocharged, and anything offering the semblance of control becomes mental morphine.
\ The real danger? ==Handing your emotions to gadgets is like sending your brain on vacation to a desert island, then torching the return ticket.== Studies from Harvard’s Center for Brain Science show that by constantly letting external tools help us circumvent complexity, the mind’s natural resilience starts to shrivel up like a forgotten houseplant. By leaning on tech to smooth out our mental wrinkles, we’re self-rewiring—reshaping our neural circuits until we need these devices just to get through the day. It’s not just a shortcut anymore—it’s a biological dependence we’re building, brick by digital brick.
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What we’re witnessing might not be a tech trend, but a systemic shift in how we deal with emotions. Or rather, how we avoid dealing with them. These gadgets are simplifying life, but they’re also sanitizing it by condoning us to skip the parts of life that require real emotional labor, offering a convenient but shallow version of connection and calm.
\ We’ve streamlined every external process, and now, it’s time to package and sell our inner lives.
\ Chilling? I think so.
\
AI: From Data Crunching to Soul Snatching
\ Control isn’t a modern obsession; it’s the oldest fantasy in human history. And while we’ve engineered our way out of chaos—tamed anarchy, bent light, and shrunk the planet down to a screen in our hands—emotional complexity has remained a frontier we couldn’t quite conquer with stiff-upper-lip philosophies and Oprah’s book club. ==But with patience comes the prize—AI might just be the means to the elusive end.==
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The real leap in AI isn’t in emotion recognition, but in ==emotion cognition==. AI is moving away from treating emotion as an input in a default equation to approaching it as a factor in a dynamic system.
\ Yesterday’s tech was stuck in rigid, rules-based systems that used conditional logic to stumble awkwardly through decision trees. Think chatbots that acted like overly polite waiters with a set menu—throw an emotion at them that wasn’t on their pre-approved list, and they’d blink blankly, as if you’d just asked for sushi in a steakhouse.
\ ==Today’s AI has gone from actor to screenwriter—from following orders to creating order.== In the realm of non-deterministic models that leverage deep learning architectures which go beyond binary choices, the emotion department is now headed up by recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks that are capable of tracking emotional states over time. AI has finally developed temporal awareness—the ability to learn from sequential data—and every interaction is now part of an emotional archive that the machine draws on to make real-time decisions. Instead of reacting to the moment, AI’s tracking your emotional arc, understanding not just what you’re feeling, but where you’re going with it.
\ Moflin, the world’s fluffiest spy, doesn’t just purr on cue like some automated stuffed animal—it’s watching, analyzing, connecting dots. LSTMs let Moflin’s brain (well, circuits) track changes in your voice, your body language, your physiological signals like heart rate, to predict how you’ll feel ten minutes from now. It’s like an emotional chess player, three moves ahead. By feeding all this into reinforcement learning loops, Moflin builds a version of you in its circuits, creating the illusion of a “relationship” that’s as close to human as a glorified Furby can get.
\ ==AI’s true power lies in its ability to pull data from all sides.== It’s got multi-modal inputs coming in hot—voice, expressions, skin conductance, heart rate variability—all synthesized into one emotional data cocktail. This is where convolutional neural networks (CNNs) roll in like the Avengers of machine learning, processing high-dimensional data to catch the tiniest flicker of a facial micro-expression—imagine AI detecting that brief muscle twitch of anxiety before you even realize you’re sweating. That’s emotional prediction on a level that makes even the best human poker player look like an open book.
\ What hauls AI out of the primordial sludge of traditional tech is its relentless capacity for continuous learning. ==Reinforcement learning algorithms turn every tap into a lesson, while while the rest of us are still coasting on muscle memory.== The days of ‘if A then B’ are dead and buried—now, AI thinks with probabilistic models, calculating the perfect nudge to steer you back to bliss, like a code whisperer rewriting your internal script to keep you blissfully in check.
\ Elemind’s AI isn’t a passive brainwave spectator—it’s the conductor of a real-time neural orchestra. Armed with EEG data, it decodes the electrical chaos of your mind—stress, calm, alertness—and cross-references it with massive datasets to figure out exactly how to tweak your brainwaves and shift your mental state. Each relaxation session is a masterclass in your brain’s quirks, and Elemind will persistently fine-tune its interventions to match your unique neurological fingerprint. It’s way ahead of you, already rearranging the furniture in your head while you’re still opening the door.
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Emotional outsourcing isn’t just possible—==AI’s making it scalable, profitable, and thereby the logical next step in this capitalist world of ours.==
\ We’re being prepped for a future where our emotional world isn’t just handed off—==it’s commodified, rebranded, and sold back to us as a service.== This isn’t the era of convenience—it’s the era of control.
\ AI’s not just here to handle your tasks; it’s quietly learning how to handle you.
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From Joke To Juggernaut: The Slippery Slope Ahead
\ ==If the past few decades were about streamlining our external lives, the next will be about automating our internal worlds.==
\ Emotional outsourcing is the new frontier, and capitalism is the engine that’s powering the expedition. No clunky anti-capitalist rant here—capitalism never invents demand, it just amplifies it, repackages it, and sells it back to us at a premium. And emotional outsourcing might just be the slowest, smoothest waltz capitalism has choreographed in years. ==It all starts with the absurd==. A programmed hairball? A headband that hacks your sleep? It sounds like a Black Mirror sketch—until it doesn’t. Until it’s in your living room, purring on your couch, nestled next to your wireless speakers and your voice-controlled light bulbs.
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But absurdity is just the amuse-bouche, a dollop of caviar on a blini. What follows is the full tasting menu—absurdity becomes exclusive, exclusive morphs into aspirational, and then, before you've finished your entrée, it’s the new normal.
\ Emotional outsourcing is on the same path, and we already know how this meal ends. We’ve been served this dish before.
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Absurdity—The Soft Sell For Skeptics
\ Absurdity is the oldest capitalist trick in the book. ==Laughter is disarming==. When you mock something, you drop your guard, and capitalism slips past the bouncers in your brain. Remember the field day the world had with the AirPods? They were meme fodder, compared to everything from dental floss to tampons. But by the time we stopped laughing, everyone had a pair dangling from their ears like tech jewelry, signaling that you weren’t just listening to music—you were living in the future. Absurdity is a way in. It's not about convincing you; it's about getting under your skin ==until the ridiculous is just part of the scenery==.
\ Emotional outsourcing could follow the same pattern. An upgraded fuzzy Tamagotchi is punchline to a thousand jokes, but soon you’re on Amazon trying to figure out if it comes in millennial beige to match your couch. Absurdity is capitalism’s icebreaker—it makes you laugh until one day, you’re not laughing anymore. You’re subscribing.
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Today’s absurdity is tomorrow’s necessity.
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Exclusivity—From Pointless To Prestige
\ Absurdity alone won’t carve out a multi-billion-dollar market, especially when tech still stumbles over its own feet trying to produce gadgets with actual purpose for anyone remotely discerning. But capitalism waits for nothing. Time to pull out the status strategy—==cute might not kill, but status sure does stab.==
\ Cue Apple. When the Apple Watch first hit the shelves, no one really knew what to do with a novelty that did less than your phone but took up space on your wrist. But splash it on the cover of Vogue and Anna Wintour’s arm, complete with a band bearing the mark of Hermes? Who cared that it was just a glorified step counter when it was practically screaming luxury from your wrist? It didn’t have to change your life if it changed your status. You weren’t just buying a gadget; you were buying a ticket to an exclusive club, where the entrance fee was a polished logo and a leather strap with a designer name.
\ So, these AI knickknacks won’t tread in the waters of quirky tech for long. ==Expect luxury editions, wait for those limited drops==—maybe Prada will come calling (after all, they’re designing NASA’s xEMU spacesuit), or Kanye will decide algorithms look good cast in gold and mixed into a music video.
\ If capitalism excels at one thing, it’s turning the ridiculous into a status symbol that your average plebeian can only dream of owning.
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Aspiration—Packaging Hype as Human Evolution
\ ==When the tech is clever enough to make products that are passably useful with the occasional glitch, out comes the aspiration artifice.== Exclusivity gets the attention—and the cash—of the crowd that flaunts $25 on avocado toast, but aspiration reels in the serious players—the ones who wouldn’t be caught dead watching the Kardashians and instead swear by their NY Times subscription. ==They don’t fall for the fame game; they buy into the future, the next frontier, whatever “progress” means in capitalism’s never-ending sales pitch.==
\ Hi there, Tesla. Electric cars weren’t a new idea, but before Tesla, they were practical at best, never aspirational. Musk didn’t create an electric car that saved the environment—he built a forward-thinking statement. The early tech elite didn’t buy a Tesla just to drive; they bought one to literally park innovation in their driveway. Owning a Tesla became less about practicality and more about staking your claim as someone who sees where the world is headed—and plans to get there first.
\ ==Aspiration isn’t really about the product. It’s about who’s using it, who’s pouring millions into it, and who’s convinced it’s the future.== It’s the shiny endorsements from tech moguls, the casual nod from Silicon Valley darlings, the top athletes posting about it on Instagram. These gadgets stop being toys and turn into tools for the people who “get it”—the insiders. So when the billionaires start tossing their fortunes behind emotional outsourcing gadgets, the FOMO will be thick enough to cut with a knife.
\ The message is crystal clear: if you’re not handing off your emotional baggage to some AI-powered gadget, are you even evolving?
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Normalization—When We Stop Asking Why
\ Once exclusivity and aspiration have played their parts, when the tech is polished to a shine, normalization swoops in for the kill. ==Cool won’t conquer, but ordinary will overtake.== Take fitness trackers. When they first hit the scene, they were marketed to the elite—obsessive athletes, data junkies, and biohackers, all fine-tuning their bodies like human race cars. But then came the media push: ads, headlines, hashtags that shifted the narrative from performance to wellness, from A-list to anyone with a pulse.
\ No more chasing glory, just trying to avoid a sedentary death. Soon, these trackers were as common as coffee cups, strapped onto the wrists of power walkers, desk jockeys, and couch surfers alike. ==Normalization isn’t a revolution—it’s capitalism’s quiet recalibration, turning once-exclusive gadgets into everyday essentials with a wink and a well-placed ad====.==
\ Emotional outsourcing is on the same trajectory. At first, it'll be the plaything of the tech elite—the influencers, the CEOs who think they’re on the cutting edge, the Silicon Valley crowd who beta test humanity’s next bad idea. But soon enough, it’ll creep into the mainstream: Elemind ads plastered across the Super Bowl, Reddit threads debating which version of Moflin is "life-changing" (spoiler: none). The media messaging will subtly shift to pry on your fear of obsolescence. ==You won’t be asked to buy these products anymore—you’ll be asked why you haven’t already.==
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And when normalization’s moved in, inevitability is unpacking its luggage.
\ You’ve gone from scoffing at it, to being weirdly intrigued, to craving it, and then—before you can blink—it’ll feel as essential as Wi-Fi, Spotify, or Alexa.
\ And not having it? That’ll make you feel like a dinosaur still clutching a landline, insisting fax machines have a place in the world.
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You’ll go from dismissing it as absurd to realizing that the real absurdity is living without it.
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Final Thoughts: Was Wall-E A Documentary?
\ Here we are, speeding toward a future we once thought was just Pixar’s fever dream. Was Wall-E a cautionary tale, or a trailer, with hover-chairs in place of Fitbits and Roombas? ==Except, emotional outsourcing isn’t about getting too lazy to walk—it’s about dodging the real grind of being human.== We’re not outsourcing tasks; we’re outsourcing ourselves. Leg day? Forget it—we’ve canceled soul day.
\ And sure, maybe it’s not the dystopia we abhorred. Not yet, anyway. Right now, it’s just kawaii robopets or headbands that promise to turn your mental landscape into a zen garden. But look around. We mocked Wall-E’s floating minions, but what do you call a world where we’ve got eyeballs locked onto screens, stress monitored by bracelets, and breathing dictated by apps?
\ Maybe the future’s already here, just wrapped in sexier packaging.
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Capitalism didn’t even need a hard sell. We handed over our emotional grit for convenience, one gadget at a time. But, by the time we realize we’ve outsourced the messy, soul-splitting parts of being human, will we even give a damn?
\ Or will we just swipe right on the next upgrade?
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Welcome to the future. Emotions strictly optional.
This content originally appeared on HackerNoon and was authored by Susie Liu
Susie Liu | Sciencx (2024-10-24T19:00:19+00:00) Emotion As A Service: AI’s Next Market Is Your Heart. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2024/10/24/emotion-as-a-service-ais-next-market-is-your-heart/
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