Brian Stauffer for BI
Michal Kosinski knows exactly how he sounds when he talks about his research. And how it sounds is not great.
A psychologist at Stanford University, Kosinski is a specialist in psychometrics — a field that attempts to measure the facets of the human mind. For more than a decade, his work has freaked people right the hell out. In study after study, Kosinski has made scarily plausible claims that machine-learning algorithms of artificial intelligence can discern deeply private things about us — our intelligence, our sexual preferences, our political beliefs — using little more than our Facebook likes and photographs of our faces.
"I'm not even interested in faces," Kosinski insists. "There was nothing in my career that indicated I'd be spending a few years looking at people's appearances."