As biometric tracking takes over the modern workplace, the old game of labor surveillance is finding new forms.
Housed in a triumph of architectural transparency in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the Media Lab complex at MIT, a global hub of human-machine research. From the outside of its newest construction, you can see clear through the building. Inside are open workspaces, glittering glass walls, and screens, all encouragement for researchers to peek in on one another. Everybody always gets to observe everybody else.
Here, computational social scientist Alex Pentland, known in the tech world as the godfather of wearables, directs a team that has created technology applied in Google Glass, smart watches, and other electronic or computerized devices you can wear or strap to your person. In Pentland’s quest to reshape society by tracking human behavior with software algorithms, he has discovered you don’t need to look through a glass window to find out what a person is up to. A wearable device can trace subliminal signals in a person’s tone of voice, body language, and interactions. From a distance, you can monitor not only movements and habits; you can begin to surmise thoughts and motivations.
In the mid-2000s Pentland invented the sociometric badge, which looks like an ID card and tracks and analyzes the wearer’s interactions, behavior patterns, and productivity. It became immediately clear that the technology would appeal to those interested in a more hierarchical kind of oversight than that enjoyed by the gurus of MIT’s high-tech playgrounds. In 2010 Pentland cofounded Humanyze, a company that offers employers the chance to find out how employee behavior affects their business. It works like this: A badge hanging from your neck embedded with microphones, accelerometers, infrared sensors, and a Bluetooth connection collects data every sixteen milliseconds, tracking such matters as how far you lean back in your chair, how often you participate in meetings, and what kind of conversationalist you are. Each day, four gigabytes’ worth of information about your office behavior is compiled and analyzed by Humanyze. This data, which then is delivered to your supervisor, reveals patterns that supposedly correlate with employee productivity.
Humanyze CEO Ben Waber, a former student of Pentland’s, has claimed to take his cues from the world of sports, where “smart clothes” are used to measure the mechanics of a pitcher’s throw or the launch of a skater’s leap. He is determined to usher in a new era of “Moneyball for business,” a nod to baseball executive Billy Beane, whose data-driven approach gave his team, the Oakland Athletics, a competitive edge. With fine-grained biological data points, Waber promises to show how top office performers behave—what happy, productive workers do.
Bank of America hired Humanyze to use sociometric badges to study activity at the bank’s call centers, which employ more than ten thousand souls in the United States alone. By scrutinizing how workers communicated with one another during breaks, analysts came to the conclusion that allowing people to break together, rather than in shifts, reduced stress. This was indicated by voice patterns picked up by the badge, processed by the technology, and reported on an analyst’s screen. Employees grew happier. Turnover decreased.
The executives at Humanyze emphasize that minute behavior monitoring keeps people content. So far, the company has focused on loaning the badges to clients for limited study periods, but as Humanyze scales up, corporate customers may soon be able to use their own in-house analysts and deploy the badges around the clock.
Workers of the world can be happy all the time.
The optimists’ claim: technologies that monitor every possible dimension of biological activity can create faster, safer, and more efficient workplaces, full of employees whose behavior can be altered in accordance with company goals.
Widespread implementation is already underway. Tesco employees stock shelves with greater speed when they wear armbands that register their rate of activity. Military squad leaders are able to drill soldiers toward peak performance with the use of skin patches that measure vital signs. On Wall Street, experiments are ongoing to monitor the hormones of stock traders, the better to encourage profitable trades. According to cloud-computing company Rackspace, which conducted a survey in 2013 of four thousand people in the United States and United Kingdom, 6 percent of businesses provide wearable devices for workers. A third of the respondents expressed readiness to wear such devices, which are most commonly wrist- or head-mounted, if requested to do so.
Biological scrutiny is destined to expand far beyond on-the-job performance. Workers of the future may look forward to pre-employment genetic testing, allowing a business to sort potential employees based on disposition toward anything from post-traumatic stress disorder to altitude sickness. Wellness programs will give employers reams of information on exercise habits, tobacco use, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and body mass index. Even the monitoring of brain signals may become an office commonplace: at IBM, researchers bankrolled by the military are working on functional magnetic-resonance imaging, or fMRI, a technology that can render certain brain activities into composite images, turning thoughts into fuzzy external pictures. Such technology is already being used in business to divine customer preferences and detect lies. In 2006 a San Diego start-up called No Lie MRI expressed plans to begin marketing the brain-scanning technology to employers, highlighting its usefulness for employee screening. And in Japan, researchers at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have a dream-reading device in the pipeline that they claim can predict what a person visualizes during sleep. Ryan Hurd, who serves on the board of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, says such conditioning could be used to enhance performance. While unconscious, athletes could continue to practice; creative types could boost their imaginations.
The masterminds at Humanyze have grasped a fundamental truth about surveillance: a person watched is a person transformed. The man who invented the panopticon—a circular building with a central inspection tower that has a view of everything around it—gleaned this, too. But contrary to most discussions of the “all-seeing place,” the idea was conceived not for the prison, but for the factory.
by Lynn Stuart Parramore, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Housed in a triumph of architectural transparency in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the Media Lab complex at MIT, a global hub of human-machine research. From the outside of its newest construction, you can see clear through the building. Inside are open workspaces, glittering glass walls, and screens, all encouragement for researchers to peek in on one another. Everybody always gets to observe everybody else.
Here, computational social scientist Alex Pentland, known in the tech world as the godfather of wearables, directs a team that has created technology applied in Google Glass, smart watches, and other electronic or computerized devices you can wear or strap to your person. In Pentland’s quest to reshape society by tracking human behavior with software algorithms, he has discovered you don’t need to look through a glass window to find out what a person is up to. A wearable device can trace subliminal signals in a person’s tone of voice, body language, and interactions. From a distance, you can monitor not only movements and habits; you can begin to surmise thoughts and motivations.In the mid-2000s Pentland invented the sociometric badge, which looks like an ID card and tracks and analyzes the wearer’s interactions, behavior patterns, and productivity. It became immediately clear that the technology would appeal to those interested in a more hierarchical kind of oversight than that enjoyed by the gurus of MIT’s high-tech playgrounds. In 2010 Pentland cofounded Humanyze, a company that offers employers the chance to find out how employee behavior affects their business. It works like this: A badge hanging from your neck embedded with microphones, accelerometers, infrared sensors, and a Bluetooth connection collects data every sixteen milliseconds, tracking such matters as how far you lean back in your chair, how often you participate in meetings, and what kind of conversationalist you are. Each day, four gigabytes’ worth of information about your office behavior is compiled and analyzed by Humanyze. This data, which then is delivered to your supervisor, reveals patterns that supposedly correlate with employee productivity.
Humanyze CEO Ben Waber, a former student of Pentland’s, has claimed to take his cues from the world of sports, where “smart clothes” are used to measure the mechanics of a pitcher’s throw or the launch of a skater’s leap. He is determined to usher in a new era of “Moneyball for business,” a nod to baseball executive Billy Beane, whose data-driven approach gave his team, the Oakland Athletics, a competitive edge. With fine-grained biological data points, Waber promises to show how top office performers behave—what happy, productive workers do.
Bank of America hired Humanyze to use sociometric badges to study activity at the bank’s call centers, which employ more than ten thousand souls in the United States alone. By scrutinizing how workers communicated with one another during breaks, analysts came to the conclusion that allowing people to break together, rather than in shifts, reduced stress. This was indicated by voice patterns picked up by the badge, processed by the technology, and reported on an analyst’s screen. Employees grew happier. Turnover decreased.
The executives at Humanyze emphasize that minute behavior monitoring keeps people content. So far, the company has focused on loaning the badges to clients for limited study periods, but as Humanyze scales up, corporate customers may soon be able to use their own in-house analysts and deploy the badges around the clock.
Workers of the world can be happy all the time.
The optimists’ claim: technologies that monitor every possible dimension of biological activity can create faster, safer, and more efficient workplaces, full of employees whose behavior can be altered in accordance with company goals.
Widespread implementation is already underway. Tesco employees stock shelves with greater speed when they wear armbands that register their rate of activity. Military squad leaders are able to drill soldiers toward peak performance with the use of skin patches that measure vital signs. On Wall Street, experiments are ongoing to monitor the hormones of stock traders, the better to encourage profitable trades. According to cloud-computing company Rackspace, which conducted a survey in 2013 of four thousand people in the United States and United Kingdom, 6 percent of businesses provide wearable devices for workers. A third of the respondents expressed readiness to wear such devices, which are most commonly wrist- or head-mounted, if requested to do so.
Biological scrutiny is destined to expand far beyond on-the-job performance. Workers of the future may look forward to pre-employment genetic testing, allowing a business to sort potential employees based on disposition toward anything from post-traumatic stress disorder to altitude sickness. Wellness programs will give employers reams of information on exercise habits, tobacco use, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and body mass index. Even the monitoring of brain signals may become an office commonplace: at IBM, researchers bankrolled by the military are working on functional magnetic-resonance imaging, or fMRI, a technology that can render certain brain activities into composite images, turning thoughts into fuzzy external pictures. Such technology is already being used in business to divine customer preferences and detect lies. In 2006 a San Diego start-up called No Lie MRI expressed plans to begin marketing the brain-scanning technology to employers, highlighting its usefulness for employee screening. And in Japan, researchers at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have a dream-reading device in the pipeline that they claim can predict what a person visualizes during sleep. Ryan Hurd, who serves on the board of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, says such conditioning could be used to enhance performance. While unconscious, athletes could continue to practice; creative types could boost their imaginations.
The masterminds at Humanyze have grasped a fundamental truth about surveillance: a person watched is a person transformed. The man who invented the panopticon—a circular building with a central inspection tower that has a view of everything around it—gleaned this, too. But contrary to most discussions of the “all-seeing place,” the idea was conceived not for the prison, but for the factory.
by Lynn Stuart Parramore, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Edgar Degas
