In the workplace, companies has begun to implement emotion-sensing or biometric monitoring devices to hire, manage and fire employees. Products such as Moodbeam, a wearable “mood awareness” or “mood monitoring” device is designed to read an employee’s happiness (or sadness) levels and share the daily results with one’s coworkers and immediate supervisors. Makers of the device position their wrist wearable as part of a new age of emotion-focused corporate wellness initiatives. Companies like Japan’s Empath and America’s Cogito have developed their own voice-analytic software to monitor the moods of call center employees around the world.

But Emotional AI goes beyond mere voice analytics. For example, HireVue, is a Utah-based company that uses state-of-the-art emotional artificial intelligence software to assess a candidate’s potential, and predict their likelihood of success within the company in the event that they are hired. The goal of companies like HireVue is to not only expedite the interview and hiring process, but it’s to unleash AI’s ability to see and analyze what human eyes are simply unable to do. 

Although the sheer number of companies entering the field of artificial intelligence may indicate otherwise, there are numerous naysayers who warn of its dangers. Empath and Cogito certainly have their quantified benefits, but for many surveillance scholars and privacy advocates their ability to surveil the inner recesses of the worker-self has been called invasive. These critics see emotion self-trackers as the presage of an authoritarian, ‘woke’ society, where mood policing in social and work situations will become the new normal in a dystopian future similar to something out the Netflix series, ‘Black Mirror’.