In this brave new year, Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, is planning to do some joint projects with the University of New Mexico and Caltech. Here’s the plan:
In 2004 we intend to integrate simultaneous four-person 128-channel EEG recording,” says [Sandia project manager Peter] Merkle, “correlating brain events, physiologic dynamics, and social phenomena to develop assistive methods to improve group and individual performance.
Say what? The idea is to soup up your computer with sensors and transmitters (called a PAL–Personal Assistance Link) that will:
monitor your perspiration and heartbeat, read your facial expressions and head motions, analyze your voice tones, and correlate these to keep you informed with a running account of how you are feeling — something you may be ignoring — instead of waiting passively for your factual questions. It also will transmit this information to others in your group so that everyone can work together more effectively.
Personally, I don’t have any complaints about my computer waiting around passively for a factual question, and I definitely don’t want the office administrator–that ignorant, gossiping, witch–to get vibes from a shared PAL network. What’s really irritating, though, is the flippant way that Merkle addresses privacy concerns:
Those concerned about privacy…can always opt out, he says, just like people choose not to respond to emails or decline to attend meetings.
Uh, I don’t know how it works in Sandialand, but most people I know can’t ignore e-mails and meeting requests without repercussion. To be fair, there are some amusing and potentially useful applications for this kind of technology (identifying an employee who might be too tired and stressed to monitor the space shuttle, sending pop-ups to boring meeting attendees), but the idea of giving regular worker bees a PAL is silly. And what’s with Sandia’s .gov address? I don’t know the criteria for registering a .gov address, but does this mean we’re somehow paying for PALS? A Google of .gov + domain brings up this:
Warning! Use of this site is restricted! This computer system is for the use of the United States Government. Unauthorized access, or access which exceeds authorized access is punishable under 18 USC 1030.No Tags