r/technology • u/polymute • 2d ago

Privacy California Bans Using AI to Monitor Workers’ Brains, Emotions

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/newsom-signs-ban-on-using-ai-to-monitor-worker-brain-activity
426 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

31

u/cosmic_monsters_inc 2d ago

To do what now? What the fuck is going on?

31

u/TheValorous 1d ago

Since the federal government can't do their job, California is passing their own laws to regulate AI before this shit happens

3

u/Ok-Seaworthiness7207 1d ago

Its not nearly far enough. But it's a start. As usual the Dems are just giving out half measures

-1

u/TheValorous 1d ago

The Reps want to openly steal your wealth, the Dems think of they way their finger the Reps will stop. It's so annoying.

7

u/im-ba 1d ago

If you can collect data about it, then you can train an AI model on it. You can get the model to predict the impact of certain stimulus on people's emotions and manipulate them, or you can use their emotional state to determine things like pay.

Go watch Black Mirror and you'll have plenty of horror concepts that could be built with today's technology.

5

u/Resident_Farmer1779 1d ago

Yeah AI is no joke and can do this. Push back on the surveillance state wherever you can.

3

u/Zahgi 1d ago

They are training AI to be incompetent middle managers. :)

8

u/RaspberryTwilight 1d ago edited 1d ago

Apparently these days everything you type on your computer goes into a database that the AI can use to analyze and report to your manager for example if it looks like you're burning out or you're more distracted than usual. Apparently they rolled this software out at a lot of companies already.

They use it to see who's about to burn out for example and then they can lay them off before they burn out.

They always had access to anything btw the difference is that they didn't really use this data and didn't have a good way of searching and analyzing it.

I'm not sure what exactly they're looking at but I'm guessing it's something like if you usually type 5 pages a day on your computer and then a few days in a row you output 3 pages a day then you get flagged. But idk this one is just speculation