Reality Mining: Techno-utopian Fantasy or Totalitarian Nightmare?

At the MIT Technology Review, Nicholas Carr reviews the work of Alex Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory.  Pentland's work apparently aims to help create a fully programmed social order that would be difficult to distinguish from your worst nightmare of a totalitarian surveillance society.  Excerpt:

Pentland describes a series of experiments that he and his associates have been conducting in the private sector. They go into a business and give each employee an electronic ID card, called a “sociometric badge,” that hangs from the neck and communicates with the badges worn by colleagues. Incorporating microphones, location sensors, and accelerometers, the badges monitor where people go and whom they talk with, taking note of their tone of voice and even their body language. The devices are able to measure not only the chains of communication and influence within an organization but also “personal energy levels” and traits such as “extraversion and empathy.” In one such study of a bank’s call center, the researchers discovered that productivity could be increased simply by tweaking the coffee-break schedule.

Pentland dubs this data-processing technique “reality mining,” and he suggests that similar kinds of information can be collected on a much broader scale by smartphones outfitted with specialized sensors and apps. Fed into statistical modeling programs, the data could reveal “how things such as ideas, decisions, mood, or the seasonal flu are spread in the community.” . . .

What really excites Pentland is the prospect of using digital media and related tools to change people’s behavior, to motivate groups and individuals to act in more productive and responsible ways. If people react predictably to social influences, then governments and businesses can use computers to develop and deliver carefully tailored incentives, such as messages of praise or small cash payments, to “tune” the flows of influence in a group and thereby modify the habits of its members. Beyond improving the efficiency of transit and health-care systems, Pentland suggests, group-based incentive programs can make communities more harmonious and creative.

Call me cynical, but it seems just plain deluded to assume, as Pentland apparently does, that such technology, if adopted widely by governments and businesses, would ultimately fulfill these techno-utopian fantasies, and not result in a dystopian nightmare of surveillance and control.