If you work for a large company in the US, odds are that your employer is watching you work even when you’re at home.
According to research firm Gartner, 60% of large employers track their workers using “bossware,” technology that surveils employees’ keystrokes, desktops, and location data. Spurred on by the Covid-19 pandemic and the explosive growth of AI, this surveillance has become an unavoidable part of the workplace for millions of Americans.
But could the next frontier of bossware be monitoring an employee’s facial expressions?
Some of the world’s largest and most powerful tech companies are investigating this idea. According to a recent opinion piece by Elaine Moore in the Financial Times, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Meta have all filed patents that claim to be able to track a user’s emotions through analysing their tone of voice, body language, or expressions. Multiple outlets criticised these technologies as being ‘creepy’; one piece from Futurism described Meta’s patent as a product that “listens to you and everything you do, combines it with other data, and feeds it all to a mood-predicting AI.”
These technologies have direct (if slightly unsavoury) commercial implications; the Amazon patent, for example, mentions being able to detect that a user is ill and then having Alexa recommend flu medicine. However, this tracking could also be used by employers as another set of data metrics with which to track and quantify performance.
For some people, facial monitoring is already a component of the workplace. Truck drivers have been the guinea pigs of this technology initiative, with companies like Visage Technologies offering software that monitors drivers’ faces for signs of distracted driving or drowsiness. Although driver-facing cameras are increasingly being rolled out in fleets across the country, according to the American Transportation Research Institute, these cameras remain unpopular among truck drivers due to privacy concerns, especially among female drivers.
In fact, most Americans are opposed to the idea of having their expressions monitored throughout the workday. According to a poll from the Pew Research Center, 70% of Americans oppose the use of facial recognition technology by employers to analyse employees’ facial expressions. When non-profit news site The Conversation launched a survey on emotion AI in the workplace, the most common concern about this technology was the loss of privacy, which can have significant negative effects like stress and paranoia on employees.
According to Tara Behrend, a professor of psychology at Purdue University and expert on bossware, digital surveillance can also lead to increased burnout. In a conversation on the American Psychological Association’s podcast, Behrend explained how when employees are constantly worried about how they’re being perceived by the surveillance technology and “putting forward the right image or the right behaviour”. According to her research, this leads to distraction and anxiety for employees.
As AI machine learning continues to improve, so will its ability to track human emotions through visual and auditory cues. Companies may be tempted to use this technology to monitor their employees, as a way to turn happiness into a KPI that can be easily displayed in a quarterly chart. However, the adoption of this technology in the workplace will almost certainly have the opposite effect – turning the focus of employees from performing their jobs to performing for the AI panopticon. In many workplaces across the country, everything employees do or say is already surveilled.
Will how they feel be next? – Inc./Tribune News Service
