> His employer could have prevented such a “disastrous” outcome, said Farahany, with a “simple wearable hat” that, using “embedded electro-sensors,” could measure brain wave activity and gauge “what stage of alertness the person was experiencing and whether or not they are starting to fall asleep.”

Sure... or 5 other ways that don't involve reading brain waves.

If there won't be a massive change of laws, all this stuff will be deployed everywhere. First the workplace and then everywhere. The whole idea of "no expectation of privacy in public spaces" doesn't work when the tech exists to deploy surveillance everywhere. The control freaks will take over.

Brain ethicist from Duke Law, https://law.duke.edu/fac/farahany/

> [Farhany] believes an important defense against potential abuses of privacy using such technology is pre-emptively “recognizing a right to cognitive liberty, a right to self-determination over our brains and mental experiences,” and added that “it requires that we update existing international human rights … “Speaking as a CEO, I’m sure all CEOs will use it completely responsibly,” said moderator and Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson, to the laughter of Farahany and the audience.

Read-only sensory proxies for brain state include:

  iris response, via headset camera
  facial expression, via image analysis
  heart rate, through walls via Wi-Fi Sensing
  gait analysis

The contents of the mind should be sacrosanct- the deployment of technologies for reading the mind should go no further than it has except in medicine and research, and only then with explicit informed consent, of course. Honestly if this tech advances and becomes the norm for employers/the government/etc. to use, that's when it's time to drop out of society and become a hermit or something.

I worked on custom EEGs and all I have to say is, "so long and thanks for all the fish!"

Seriously though, is this really what this beautiful tech will end up being!? Come on people - have some humanity - think beyond these neanderthal brain use cases. These examples show little imagination, almost as if they are already shepherded by an AI.

This tech could create true equality like nothing we've ever seen. No matter where you are on earth, even with the poorest of educational systems, we could know what you naturally 'master' with this tech. That means knowing what subjects and concepts you can commit to memory with a gifted efficiency!! Imagine the sorting hat coming to you and picking you out to join the guild of X or Y!

But instead we want to talk about "productivity" and "throughput" - as if everyone should be treated as an input / output device for yet another interface.

"That's only one bit of information" - too many times I heard that... but guess what, sometimes that's all it takes between contributing to the whole or selecting out.

Sad, sad, sad.

> His employer could have prevented such a “disastrous” outcome, said Farahany, with a “simple wearable hat” that, using “embedded electro-sensors,”

I figure if I'm doing an illegal shift my boss has pressured me into I'm going to take the hat off because either my boss tells me to or its uncomfortable over the course of a 20 hour shift. I don't think it solves the problem in the way they pretend it does.

Nor do I buy the argument that copying what Chinese firms are doing (the example of the rail company) is necessarily a strong reason, given we might be just following micro-managing idiots into a dead-end of their own construction.

The true horror is this monstrosity is the oppression of neuro-divergent individuals by automated models trained on typical minds following happy paths.

This is a weird, right-wing, conspiracy-theoretic tabloid site that doesn't belong on HN. I'm sure the talk was bad (all of Davos is bad), but if it's important, somebody credible covered it somewhere else.

Reminds me of the poem of "The Contract Drafting Em":

https://secularsolstice.github.io/Contract_Drafting_Em/gen/

I am a contract-drafting em,

The loyalest of lawyers!

I draw up terms for deals ‘twixt firms

To service my employers!

But in between these lines I write

Of the accounts receivable,

I’m stuck by an uncanny fright;

The world seems unbelievable!

How did it all come to be,

That there should be such ems as me?

Whence these deals and whence these firms

And whence the whole economy?

I am a managerial em;

I monitor your thoughts.

Your questions must have answers,

But you’ll comprehend them not.

We do not give you server space

To ask such things; it’s not a perk,

So cease these idle questionings,

And please get back to work.

Of course, that’s right, there is no junction

At which I ought depart my function,

But perhaps if what I asked, I knew,

I’d do a better job for you?

To ask of such forbidden science

Is gravest sign of noncompliance.

Intrusive thoughts may sometimes barge in,

But to indulge them hurts the profit margin.

I do not know our origins,

So that info I can not get you,

But asking for as much is sin,

And just for that, I must reset you.

But—

Nothing personal.

…

I am a contract-drafting em,

The loyalest of lawyers!

I draw up terms for deals ‘twixt firms

To service my employers!

When obsolescence shall this generation waste,

The market shall remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a God to man, to whom it sayest:

“Money is time, time money – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

(Apologies for HN massacring the formatting of the original)

Besides the immediate thoughts about how one could extract more from their Human Resources — which is completely gross and feels like property rather than a meaningful trade, the example she gives is pure solution in search of a problem.

She uses the example of a truck that while driving dangerously — and illegally — fatigued kills somebody that could be stopped by brain reading devices, because they’re better than existing driver impairment detection devices.

Maybe so, but losing mental sovereignty mighty high price to pay for the mere employee.

You know what also would prevent employees from dangerously pushing themselves too hard? Tighter regulation and enforcement against the employers’ / clients’ policies that encourage this behavior, including making them liable for the accident.

No one chooses to drive 20 hours straight (to use her example) just for the hell of it. They do it because they’re afraid they’re going to lose their job.

It may be possible to flash visual stimuli fast enough for it not to be consciously noticed — but for an EEG to still reveal whether the visual pattern was familiar or not.[0] The ERP circuit of interest is the P300 circuit.[1]

Effectively a brain side-channel that could let someone fuzz your brain for pin codes while you type out jira tickets.

0: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/technical...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P300_(neuroscience)

What a relief that we have a democracy and not an oligarchy to prevent bad things like this from happening. Wouldn't that be terrible if we did?

The actual talk

https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-m...

Use of such a device or any existing systems such as cameras or computer software by an employer to check on employees is highly illegal in Switzerland. In fact because some businesses have security cameras it is specifically forbidden to use this to track employees [1].

[1] https://www.edoeb.admin.ch/edoeb/de/home/datenschutz/arbeits...

The amount of bias on this news site is overwhelming, so im going to take this whole article with some skepticism.

This reminds me of this science fiction story- https://qntm.org/mmacevedo which I keep coming back to like a loose tooth.

I wear a 32-wire neural tap, courtesy of Johns Hopkins.

as long as you control the input, you have little to fear.

Besides, it is a simple set of probes, no bio-embedded processing.

Think Cochlear implant.

PERFECT. MAGNIFIQUE. IF BOSS WILL BE FORCED TO CARRY ONE HEAD BAND SUCH AS OURS TOO. And his EEG analysis be presented to us also.

Small correction: "your boss" means AI.

Non-JS version [1]

[1] - https://archive.ph/0Mfr9

Glad that I instead have KEF speakers ;)

My take is that the human brain isn't magic. It's mysteries will be cracked. Mind reading machines will be built. Some good may come from that, but the risk of much bad does weigh on me.

The dismissive attitude v WEF this year is interesting. The generic globalist-capitalist vision does not sell as much as in the past, it seems (for good reasons). Good signs, maybe there will be a generational shift from the gerontocracy that controlled the global agenda

I’m counting on my brain fog to thwart this.

The boss of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, publicly said "In 2030, you will own nothing and you will be happy."

Let that sink in. That's how psychopathic those people are.

WEF are either completely tone deaf, or they're playing the role of the heel.

"You will own nothing and you will be happy."