Taiwan Develops Face-Recognition Vending Machine 86
angry tapir writes "Government-funded researchers in Taiwan have developed a vending machine that recommends purchases based on people's faces. We've previously discussed a Japanese vending machine that recommended drinks based using facial recognition. The Taiwanese machine can look for clues like whether a person has glasses, a beard or a mustache and based on that it guesses their use of make-up or frequency of shaving. It then might recommend a facial mask, razor, or health products that people in a certain category are statistically likely to buy."
philosophical issue (Score:3, Interesting)
maybe I'm weird, but at some point I talked to my friends about rashes from shaving, and how to avoid them, and it seemed like an intimate discussion. What would happen to humans as social animals, if a lot of these physiological issues would be "discussed" only with automated systems?
I mean... our minds are housed in these machines. Taking care of these machines is a big part of our time, and yet we have moments when we consider all this to be nonessential ("I am a thinking mind, concerned with math and science, not a body"). However, what would it really mean to remove all of the conversations about taking care of the machines from our social interactions?
Maybe I'm just in a "back to the trees" phase today, sorry if this is seems like a nonissue.