Marshall Brain's Blog

Big brother will watch you in the office

From the article:

HITACHI is demonstrating a system which means that if you're in the office you'll be able to run, but you may not be able to hide.
According to a report in the Nikkei Business Daily, the system will use chair based sensors, wireless enabled name tags, while the whole tracking system will be controlled from a single PC.

This is how it's supposed to work. When you get up from your chair, your wireless name tag is activated, and beams your location every half a minute. The wireless signal uses a base station within the office to forward info about your location to the PC.

The person operating the PC can tell exactly where you are, and presumably "questions will be asked" if you spend too much time in the loo, or if your name goes off the radar because you've headed outside for a crafty cigarette.

The article hypothesizes other uses. For example, if two people seem to spend a lot of time near each other, they may be having an office tryst. If too many people get together for an "unscheduled meeting", it may indicate a huge waste of time or potential mutiny. And so on.

If you want to see where systems like this lead us, read the book Manna.

See also Manna and the water heater.