Companies Already Investing in Tech to Scan Employees’ Brains

Borg Refinery

Borg Refinery

Active member
It's no secret that a lot of bosses out there would love to get inside their employees' heads. And now, perhaps unfortunately for said employees, they might be starting to actually do so.

A number of companies have cropped up in recent years offering employers mind-reading devices for their workforce. InnerEye, for example, is an Israeli company that claim its headsets combine machine learning with the innate power of the human mind, ultimately helping workers eliminate indecisiveness and work faster than ever before. Emotiv, a San Francisco startup, claims to be able to track employees' well-being with wireless EEGs headsets.


"By connecting humans and machines," reads InnerEyes's website, "InnerEye combines the best of both worlds."

Dystopian? Sure. But these companies aren't outliers. As IEEE's Spectrum reports, this is a burgeoning market, and employers are starting to invest.

Bossware Lite​

The general pitch for this device class is familiar, if not convenient: it's a tool not only for enhancing productivity, but for ensuring employee wellness. They might technically be monitoring employees, but only for their sake. In helping employees make quick, almost mindless decisions, InnerEye's AI turns everyday workers into super-humans. Emotiv just wants to keep workers happy.

"The dystopian potential of this technology is not lost on us," Tan Le, Emotiv's CEO and cofounder, told Spectrum. "So we are very cognizant of choosing partners that want to introduce this technology in a responsible way — they have to have a genuine desire to help and empower employees."

Importantly, this employee-forward marketing approach distinguishes these devices — in branding efforts, at least — from "bossware," a growing field of consumer tech committed to offering employee surveillance in a remote work-driven world.

Still, marketing is just that: marketing, and given the prevalence of datamining and the steady rise of bossware, hesitant employees can be forgiven for feeling incredulous towards mind-reading headsets, particularly for their privacy's sake. (For their part, Emotiv's Le told Spectrum that the data from its EEGs belongs to the worker, who has to "explicitly allow a copy of it to be shared anonymously" with higher-ups.)

But even privacy aside, the jury's still out on whether workforces actually want this stuff. But based on the apparent interest from some employers, it may not ultimately be some folks' choice.

"I think there is significant interest from employers," Karen Rommelfanger, who founded the Institute of Neuroethics, told Spectrum. "I don't know if there's significant interest from employees."
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One of the virtues of Sci-Fi is it enables society to consider such issues before they confront us.

My reason for skepticism about the utility of such technology at this nascent stage is:
If Israel tests a candidate for loyalty, and tests verify the candidate has superior aptitude for loyalty, is that enough? What if the candidate is a Palestinian mole?

High tech is miraculous. But it's a perilous mistake to expect more of it than it provides.
 
Borg, this topic is alarming enough as is. We can expect this and similar technology to evolve. Where will it lead?
In the U.S. healthcare is provided by employers. And healthcare may already include body scans, X-rays for broken bones, brain scans for cancer, etc.
The change here is not that the body is scanned, but that it is scanned not for healthcare but for employment eligibility.
If disputed, the courts will settle it. Until then, and perhaps after, employment candidates can decline. Today labor is in demand in the U.S., unemployment low. That won't last forever. Lord knows what prospective employers will require when jobs are scarce.
And when brain scan technology improves? If a brain scan or other test can determine not only degree of loyalty but to whom the loyalty is devoted? That's mind reading. If employers are allowed to do that, will government be far behind?
 
titan said:
And when brain scan technology improves? If a brain scan or other test can determine not only degree of loyalty but to whom the loyalty is devoted?
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I consider that a "thin edge of the wedge" or "slippery slope" argument.

It reminds me of a 4th Amendment dispute. One scholar presumed there would never be technology to read the content of documents inside a locked desk. The other was not so sure.

Stare Decisis: to stand by things decided. Either way this precedent is set, it will stand as the law of the land, until if ever it is overturned.

I've been both an employer, and an employee. I understand an employer's right and need to have viable employees, not workers that arrive for work drunk, or too sleepy to keep their eyes open, etc. BUT !!

It's not a one-sided coin. Employees are not, and ought not be treated as slaves. Instead they must be treated with human dignity.

So Justice sear doesn't yet have enough information to rule in this case. But right now I'm inclined more toward the individual rights side.
 
Some seem to believe animals have a "6th sense" about natural phenomena such as landslides, or tsunami.
This brain scan topic brought some questions to mind:
- If an animal displays behavior indicative of a major event such as tsunami, what would such brain scan of that animal at that time reveal?
- Independent of discovering it and duplicating it artificially, might sufficiently monitoring such animals be useful as an early warning for purpose of public safety?
 
BR #6
I'm old enough to be an original Trekie. I believe I saw the very first Star Trek episode, Thursday night ~8PM.
But the permutations have gotten away from me. I don't recognize the quotation.
 
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