this is a great read from Nita Farahany. tl;dr -
🌏 neurotech will be everywhere, probably sooner than you'd imagined: neuroscience and AI are accelerating and converging to produce cheaper, more effective interfaces and smarter responses. Farahany estimates tens of thousands of workers are already using neurotech devices.
⛑ it's accelerating the field of cognitive ergonomics. Think helmets that monitor for concussion, glasses that alert operators to fatigue, earbuds that monitor cognitive load and slow complex tasks to prevent overwhelm.
🧘♀️ used well, neurotech can improve safety and productivity, in obvious and less obvious ways. Beyond preventing injury, it can help optimise workload and work rhythm. A large study of BCG consulting teams showed that more downtime increased alertness, creativity, and output quality, for example.
🙄 predictably, it's already being used poorly. Short-sighted, sloppy implementation that breaches really obvious ethical and privacy concerns is making it much harder to earn trust in this space.
🏛 smart operators (and investors) should be backing better governance. Clear policies and a sensible regulatory environment help create clarity around hard trade-offs like personal privacy vs. public safety. Ideally they also do an end-run around the kind of careless or malicious uses that do real harm, at the individual and market level.
One other thing, not in the article: it's interesting that we're not drawing a useful line around what neurotech can tell us *that we didn't already know*.
Where people genuinely lack insight into their own functioning, for example with concussion or other brain injury, the case is pretty obvious. But I'm not sure we need new devices to know when we're tired or stressed. The cognitive ergonomics problem in this case isn't that we lack the right data, it's that we're not doing anything useful with it.
If right now we hesitate to say to our team members, "you seem a little tired - shall we take a break?", we shouldn't imagine neurotech will change that culture for the better. Conversely, we don't need to wait for new shiny objects before we make the right kind of change, either.
#neurotech #cognitiveergonomics #workplacewellbeing #ethicaltech
https://lnkd.in/eE_8gMhD
AI & Cloud Business Leader | Driving Enterprise AI and Cloud Strategy
2moWow, this is incredible! 🙌 I believe AI is going to play a significant role in mental health therapy.