Safety at work: a trojan horse for new monitoring technologies?

In Stanley Kubrick's masterful film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the supercomputer HAL 9000 (heuristically programmed algorithmic computer) uses artificial intelligence to detect emotion and suffering, and controls all of a spaceship's systems, including its crew. The new labour monitoring practices we are seeing emerge today – with the stated aim of improving the working environment – appear just as outlandish. Take, for example, Canon's Beijing office, which has installed smart cameras that prevent any action from being performed (such as scheduling a meeting, accessing certain rooms, etc.) unless they detect a smile. In Europe, some companies are offering their employees the chance to participate in business-related trials which involve supplying them with glasses that establish emotion indicators. One example is the Shore app, developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Germany, and which is used in Google's'smart glasses'.