Canon is well-known while experimenting with its imaging products. The camera brand is most popular as many patents registered in its name for future tech. This time, the company has put its old product to a new use. As per the recent report, Canon is using its cameras to detect if its employees are doing well at the workplace. But the question is how it works?
Canon has installed cameras with AI-enabled smile recognition technology in its China offices. The cameras with this special feature can identify employees with a smiling face and then only allow them inside the office. This has been done to know that employees are one-hundred percent happy without any stress.
Everyone is well-aware of China’s surveillance system like how the country is superactive in terms of noting the moves and actions of its residents. The plight starts when Chinese companies decide to monitor employees to an unnerving degree using AI and algorithms, according to the reports of The Financial Times.
Companies will keep an eye on which programs employees are using on their computers via CCTV cameras. The time taken during the lunch break and tracking movements of the employees outside the office will also be monitored using mobile applications.
One of the employee wrote on Weibo (Chinese platform equivalent to Twitter), “So now the companies are not only manipulating our time, but also our emotions.”
“Workers are not being replaced by algorithms and artificial intelligence. Instead, the management is being sort of augmented by these technologies,” King’s College London academic Nick Srnicek said to The Financial Times. “Technologies are increasing the pace for people who work with machines instead of the other way around, just like what happened during the industrial revolution in the 18th century.”
