Chinese employers using brain-reading technology to detect changes in emotion

Discussed 6 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957332

Reminds me of Snowcrash & Bob Rife:

""I deal in information," he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who "interviews" him. He's sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than normal. "All television going out to Consumers throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse -- -the entire Street -- exists by virtue of a network that I own and control.

"But that means, if you'll just follow my reasoning for a bit, that when I have a programmer working under me who is working with that information, he is wielding enormous power. Information is going into his brain. And it's staying there. It travels with him when he goes home at night. It gets all tangled up into his dreams, for Christ's sake. He talks to his wife about it. And, goddamn it, he doesn't have any right to that information. If I was running a car factory, I wouldn't let workers drive the cars home or borrow tools. But that's what I do at five o'clock each day, all over the world, when my hackers go home from work.

......

So we're working on refining our management techniques so that we can control that information no matter where it is -- on our hard disks or even inside the programmers' heads. Now, I can't say more because I got competition to worry about. But it is my fervent hope that in five or ten years, this kind of thing won't even be an issue." "

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830.Snow_Crash

I would be worried- but knowing the Chinese, there is already a sensor data generator, woren by every worker to give these super-conductors the ability to be super even on a rainy brain day.

Imagine if a citizen could smell governments fear- what would that smell like? Like thousands of brand new cameras and sensors? Like the surveillance harassment with a thousand needle stings by a jealous spouse?

If everybody wears those caps- then you as a government produced evidence, that you do not trust anybody- which is a consensus that you have nobody really loyal to you.

Can they actually read anything meaningful? Last time I've looked up research on emotion reading, you needed a device much more elaborated than what you see in the picture (and it was still shit). It could just be another case of a company lobbying to put these devices everywhere to get money, it would not be the first feel-good/bogus security device deployed at a large scale. It might just be similar to the fake bomb detector: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-29459896.

I wonder if a person can get penalized for false positives, after all the system will not work a 100% without glitches. That would make for a Kafkaesk situation where a completely loyal person has to self justify his inner thoughts that got misrepresented...

Also this reminds me of a novel by Kurt Vonnegut - I think it was 'slapstick'. Here 'the Chinese' did all sorts of wondrous things like minituarizing themselves in order to solve the population problem.

Still, this may well turn out to be our future as well.

In the US, using a polygraph on an employee is illegal. China is not using polygraphs, what the article describes sounds like EEG, which is not very detailed in terms of what it can read, but is invasive.

The Chinese were already slaves to their scoring system, and now you've got this.

What if the depression subspace can't be escaped from by just twiddling with the break schedule?

This is the most dystopian article I have read in a very long time:

>“They thought we could read their mind. This caused some discomfort and resistance in the beginning,” she said.

>“After a while they got used to the device. It looked and felt just like a safety helmet. They wore it all day at work.”