The prospect of AI systems that I call ideal emotion recognition technologies (ERTs) is often defended on the assumption that social life would benefit from increased affective transparency. This paper challenges that assumption by examining the technosocial risks posed by ideal ERTs, understood as multimodal systems capable of reliably inferring inner affective states in real time. Drawing on philosophical accounts of emotional expression and social practice, as well as empirical work in affective science and social psychology, I argue that the appeal of such systems rests on a misunderstanding of the social functions of emotional expression. Emotional expressions function not only as read-outs of inner states, but also as tools for coordinating action, enabling moral repair, sustaining interpersonal trust, and supporting collective norms. These functions depend on a background of partial opacity and epistemic friction. When deployed in socially authoritative or evaluative contexts, ideal ERTs threaten this expressive space by collapsing epistemic friction, displacing relational meaning with technology-mediated affective profiles, and narrowing the space for aspirational and role-sensitive expressions. The result is a drift towards affective determinism and ambient forms of affective auditing, which undermine both social cohesion and individual agency. I argue that, although it is intuitive to think that increasing accuracy would legitimise such systems, in the case of ERTs accuracy does not straightforwardly justify their deployment, and may, in some contexts, provide a reason for regulatory restraint. I conclude by defending a function-first regulatory approach that treats expressive discretion and intentional emotional expression as constitutive of certain social goods, and that accordingly seeks to protect these goods from excessive affective legibility.

翻译：本文所称的理想情感识别技术（ERTs）的前景常基于一种假设进行辩护，即社会生活会因情感透明度的提升而受益。本文通过审视理想ERTs所带来的技术社会风险，挑战了这一假设。理想ERTs被理解为能够实时可靠推断内在情感状态的多模态系统。借鉴关于情感表达与社会实践的哲学论述，以及情感科学和社会心理学领域的实证研究，我认为此类系统的吸引力建立在对情感表达社会功能的误解之上。情感表达不仅作为内在状态的读出机制，同时也是协调行动、实现道德修复、维持人际信任以及支撑集体规范的工具。这些功能的实现依赖于部分不透明性和认知摩擦的背景。当理想ERTs被部署于具有社会权威性或评价性的情境中时，它们将通过消解认知摩擦、用技术中介的情感档案取代关系意义，以及压缩具有抱负性和角色敏感性的表达空间，从而威胁这一表达空间。其结果将导致情感决定论的倾向和环境性情感审计形式的出现，这既破坏社会凝聚力，也损害个体能动性。我认为，尽管提高准确性似乎能为此类系统提供合法性，但在ERTs的案例中，准确性并不能直接证明其部署的正当性，在某些情境下甚至可能成为实施监管约束的理由。最后，我主张一种功能优先的监管路径，该路径将表达自由裁量权和有意识的情感表达视为特定社会善的构成要素，并据此寻求保护这些善免受过度的情感可读性侵蚀。