WEF speaker touts technology allowing companies to monitor employees’ brains
A speaker during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland has touted a technology that allows companies to monitor their employees’ brains.
Legal ethicist Nita Farahany of Duke University‘s School of Law remarked that wearable brain-reading devices are no figment of the future during her Jan. 19 talk titled Ready for Brain Transparency in Davos. She described these devices as akin to “Fitbits for the brain,” similar to Neuralink implants conceptualized by Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk.
The Iranian-American scholar proceeded to elaborate on what these devices look like. She told the audience: “These are headbands, hats that have sensors that can pick up your brainwave activity, earbuds, headphones, tiny tattoos that you can wear behind your ear.”
“We can pick up emotional states. We can pick up and decode faces that you’re seeing in your consciousness; simple shapes; numbers; your PIN for your bank account.”
Farahany also joined the WEF meeting’s Transforming Medicine, Redefining Life panel discussion on Jan. 20, a day after her talk. During the discussion, she emphasized that such brain-reading technologies ought to be integrated into “multi-functional devices.”
According to the Duke scholar, brain-reading technologies have the potential to solve potential problems in the workplace. “In over 5,000 companies across the world, employees are already having their brain activity monitored to test for their fatigue levels,” Farahany said. “We, as a society, should want that.”
Farahany cited the example of train conductors in the Beijing-Shanghai railway lines who “are required to wear hats that pick up their brain activity.” Some mining companies worldwide are also resorting to wearable devices to keep tabs on their workers, she added.
Farahany: Wearables can be the “most oppressive technology”
The legal ethicist continued: “While we can’t decode speech using simple wearable devices, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot we can already decode.” This extent of data gathering, according to Farahany, will considerably increase “in the coming days as AI becomes more powerful [and] the sensors become more powerful.”
“Done well, neurotechnology has extraordinary promise. Done poorly, it could become the most oppressive technology we’ve ever introduced in a large scale across society.”
Thus, Farahany called for a “nuanced conversation” over the matter.
But according to Paul Joseph Watson of Summit News, wearable brain-reading devices could serve the bigger goal of the WEF – the combination of human intelligence and AI for censorship.
“Despite the fact that no one asked, the WEF is now advocating for the merger of human intelligence and AI systems to censor ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’ online before it is even allowed to be posted,” he wrote back in August 2022.
“They want to merge the ‘best’ aspect of human censorship and AI machine learning algorithms to ensure that people’s feelings don’t get hurt and counter-regime opinions are blacklisted.”
Watson concluded: “In other words, your free speech will probably get censored before you’re even able to post it on social media. Some are calling it ‘preemptive censorship’.”
Watch this earlier lecture by Nita Farahany that warns about brain decoding causing employees to be fired over what they are thinking about.
yogaesoteric
February 24, 2023
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