Ready for your employer to monitor your brainwaves? If you listen to music while you work, you could get work-issued earbuds so your employer can monitor your brainwaves while you work. That way, one day when you come in to work, you'll find the office in a somber mood because employee brainwave data has been subpoenaed for a lawsuit -- because one employee committed wire fraud and investigators are looking for co-conspirators by looking for people with synchronized brainwave activity. You don't know anything about the fraud but you were working with the accused employee in secret on a start-up venture. Uh-oh.
According to Nita Farahany, in this talk at the World Economic Forum, all the technology to do this exists already, now. She goes on to tout the benefits of employer brain monitoring: reduction in accidents through detection of micro-sleep, fatigue, or lapse of attention due to distraction or cognitive overload. Furthermore it can optimize brain usage through "cognitive ergonomics".
She goes on to say it can be used as a tool of oppression as well, and calls for international human rights laws guaranteeing "cognitive liberty" be put in place before the technology becomes widespread.
When she talked about "freedom of thought", I literally laughed out loud. Nobody I know believes in that. Everyone I know believes the thoughts of other people need to be controlled. (Maybe not literally everyone. It's a figure of speech.)
By way of commentary, do I think "brain transparency" at work will happen? Probably. I remember in the 1980s, there was this comedian, Yakov Smirnoff, who would tell jokes like, "In America, you watch TV. In Soviet Russia, TV watches you!" Well, it's not really a joke any more, is it? He's describing YouTube. When you watch YouTube, YouTube watches you. Everything you watch, down to the fraction of a second. They use that information for giving you recommendations and ... and other stuff. Wouldn't you like to know what the other stuff is? They know, but none of the rest of us get to know. Everyone is guessing but nobody knows. And that's just YouTube. Every aspect of life now is like this. We are always watched, but we usually don't know what the watchers are watching for.
So of course once the technology comes on line to give people access to other people's brainwaves, it's going to get used. What would be shocking would be if employer's didn't try to use this to squeeze every last ounce of productivity from employees. Look at what is happening now with tracking of every footstep of warehouse workers.
#futurology #solidstatelife #technologicalunemployment #neurotechnology #eeg