Canon Installs AI-Enabled Cameras With ‘Smile Recognition’ Tech In Its Chinese Office

Tech company Canon has installed cameras with AI-enabled “Smile recognition” technology in the office of its Chinese subsidiary Canon Information Technology a downright dystopic way to tackle the problem of workplace morale.

The cameras only let smiling workers enter rooms or book meetings, ensuring that every employee is definitely, 100 percent happy all the time.

This narrative was highlighted in a report from The Financial Times on how Chinese companies are surveilling employees to an unsettling degree with the help of AI and algorithms. Firms are monitoring which programs employees use on their computers to gauge their productivity; using CCTV cameras to measure how long they take on their lunch break, and even tracking their movements outside the office using mobile apps.

King’s College London academic Nick Srnicek told the FT that “Workers are not being replaced by algorithms and artificial intelligence. Instead, the management is being sorted of augmented by these technologies [...] 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.”

The” smile recognition” was actually announced last year as part of a suite of workplace management tools, but the technology doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention.

Although readers in the West sometimes have a tendency to dismiss the sort of surveillance described by the FT as a foreign phenomenon, countries like the US and UK are just as culpable. Amazon is perhaps the prime example of this dynamic: it’s known for squeezing every ounce of effort from its warehouse workers at the expense of their health, and even ranking their productivity using algorithms before firing those at the bottom of the scale.