“Our vision of the future is a FRICTIONLESS SOCIETY – where your face is your secure method of triggering other multiple day to day events. There will be no requirement for keys to enter your house, space facility or car, no cash or credit cards necessary to pay for goods, no tickets needed to travel on trains, buses or planes, and no passwords or signatures required to validate who you are – just your FACE!”
I’m trying to pinpoint the reason for my automatic unease when I read this statement. Is it the natural kickback to a new technology that promotes convenience, such as my mild scepticism when I could ‘tap’ for purchases under £30, or is it something more?
Our face as a tool. It just doesn’t seem so simple. Our faces change through our lives. We age. And, on a day to day basis I’m sure I look different depending on my emotional barometer. Would it require us to always look the same, to remain ageless, to wear a ‘face’ of makeup that holds the key to our identity?
We say that the eyes are the window to the soul. When we look at a close friend to see how they really are, to see what’s really going on, what they’re not saying, it is their face we observe. Their body language may hold further clues, but these signals sit alongside their facial expressions.
Our faces are intimate parts of us. Looked at closely, they ‘talk’ to us about what that person is feeling and thinking. This is unlike any other part of our body.
Will using our faces as a tool to ease our daily lives, as data multiplied across corporate databases, render this intimate part of us one-dimensional and deplete a little bit of our soul?
