
Chinese employers using brain-reading technology to detect changes in emotion - hunglee2
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2143899/forget-facebook-leak-china-mining-data-directly-workers-brains
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merricksb
Discussed 6 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957332)

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moh_maya
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](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830.Snow_Crash)

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Pica_soO
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.

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realusername
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](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-29459896).

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MichaelMoser123
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.

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partycoder
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.

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tw1010
What if the depression subspace can't be escaped from by just twiddling with
the break schedule?

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nukeop
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.”

