Lightweight sensor helmets are commercially available. China's mental health data collection and monitoring programs are very similar to American developments in tracking and analyzing the mental health of citizens through facial recognition.
Last spring, Facebook got into trouble with a personal data breach that was seen as a serious violation of the privacy rights of millions of users. Around the same time, China quietly announced that the government was openly extracting data directly from the minds of workers. Facebook leaks just pale in comparison.
The Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post describes a typical production line at the Hangzhou Zhongheng Electric plant: “According to the company itself, workers wear special helmets that monitor brain impulses, which are then used by management to adjust the pace of production and redesign workflows.
The company says it has been able to improve the overall efficiency and productivity of workers by manipulating the frequency and duration of breaks to ease mental stress.
Hangzhou Zhongheng Electric is just one example of the widespread use of devices to monitor the emotional state and other mental parameters of workers in the workplace, according to scientists and representatives of companies involved in government projects.
The wireless sensors are hidden under a regular headgear and continuously monitor brain impulses, feeding the data to host computers that use artificial intelligence algorithms to detect any adverse emotional abnormalities, such as "depression, anxiety or rage."
In addition, a special camera monitors facial expressions and monitors body temperature. Pressure sensors record any changes in gesture.
Neuro Cap is a central government-funded brain-tracking project at Ningbo University, where a lot of research is being done. The project is being carried out in more than ten factories and companies, including the Beijing Shanghai High Speed Rail Line, where train drivers use technology from Shanghai's Deayea. Built-in sensors in the headgear fields can raise an alarm if the train driver starts to fall asleep.
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The use of emotional monitoring extends to hospitals and the military, but there are no comments on this. However, instead of applying tracking technology to hospital staff, it is being used to track the patient's condition in the event of a "rage."
Jin Jia, professor of cognitive psychology at Ningbo University Business School, explains, “When the system issues a warning, the manager asks the employee to take a day off or switch to a less important operation. Some tasks require extremely high concentration of attention. There is no room for error."
Of course, she notes the initial fear and suspicion of the employees, but after a while, she says, “they got used to this device. It looks and feels like a normal safety helmet. They wore it all day long. “They thought we could actually read their minds. This caused some discomfort and resistance at the initial stage,”says the professor.
The plan is for the technology to be used as a “mental keyboard,” the essence of which is to execute commands from the user's brain without voice or mechanical action. Already, it is significantly increasing profitability and is giving China an advantage in many markets.
While the technology has raised concerns about possible abuse and calls for legislation to regulate its use, China is using it on an unprecedented scale in factories, public transport, state-owned companies and the military to improve the efficiency of its industries and ensure social stability.
China is also using facial recognition to detect traffic violations, so there is every reason to believe that the huge amount of money was not spent to improve the lives of people in the country.
As machine learning evolves step by step, we have to make trade-offs, explicit or implicit. That is why it is worth looking directly into these electronic eyes to understand all the risks and benefits associated with their use. There is clearly a potential for abuse.
Qiao Ziang, professor of management psychology at Beijing Normal University, acknowledges that Chinese technology for reading information from the brain provides a competitive advantage for those who apply it. At the same time, he is almost the only expert in China who points to obvious associations with Orwellian dystopia "1984".
Qiao said companies can also abuse this technology “to control the minds of staff and violate privacy, like Big Brother, the Thought Police, the terrible law enforcement machine in the aforementioned novel that interrogated and punished people for their beliefs, not corresponding line of leadership.
The human mind should not be used for profit. But even more than violating the right to privacy for the sake of maximizing productivity per se is the danger of our thoughts and feelings being accessible to an immoral employer. In what environment is it more profitable to spend millions on technology for tracking thoughts and feelings, when a true atmosphere of freedom allows people to speak out loud about any problem and work together to solve it?
It is clear that the Chinese government did not undertake such a massive effort to improve the lives of workers.
Igor Abramov
