Tuesday, November 22, 2022

"Workplace Brain Scanning?: Extracting and using brain data will make workers happier and more productive, backers say"

When in doubt, consult Mencken:

"The Urge to Save Humanity is Almost Always 
Only a False-Face for the Urge to Rule It"
—H.L. Mencken*

From IEEE Spectrum, November 19:

Get ready: Neurotechnology is coming to the workplace. Neural sensors are now reliable and affordable enough to support commercial pilot projects that extract productivity-enhancing data from workers’ brains. These projects aren’t confined to specialized workplaces; they’re also happening in offices, factories, farms, and airports. The companies and people behind these neurotech devices are certain that they will improve our lives. But there are serious questions about whether work should be organized around certain functions of the brain, rather than the person as a whole.

To be clear, the kind of neurotech that’s currently available is nowhere close to reading minds. Sensors detect electrical activity across different areas of the brain, and the patterns in that activity can be broadly correlated with different feelings or physiological responses, such as stress, focus, or a reaction to external stimuli. These data can be exploited to make workers more efficient—and, proponents of the technology say, to make them happier. Two of the most interesting innovators in this field are the Israel-based startup InnerEye, which aims to give workers superhuman abilities, and Emotiv, a Silicon Valley neurotech company that’s bringing a brain-tracking wearable to office workers, including those working remotely....

....MUCH MORE
*You may have seen the introductory quote mis-stated with "false front" rather than "false face" but Quote Investigator sets us right.