05/09/2026
We already know AI is dangerous when used in therapeutic settings as a replacement for human therapists. This is not only a violation of privacy. But if humans are still learning to understand their own emotions and the needs below them, why on earth would you trust a set of algorithmic calculations to do so? And what on earth are employers doing with the data they gather?
This is not only a slippery slope. It is dangerous. And an all-out assault on employees.
First, companies used AI to analyze worker productivity—now they’re using it to supercharge corporate surveillance by monitoring employee emotion, Ellen Cushing reports. https://theatln.tc/ToMYuKjr
The technology, referred to in the industry as “emotion AI” or “affective computing,” can monitor an employee through their company devices to draw conclusions on their attitude and morale in the workplace, Cushing writes. The Slack integration Aware advertises its ability to continuously monitor messages for “sentiment and toxicity”; Microsoft’s cloud-computing software Azure also allows employers to, theoretically, use AI to batch-analyze workers’ chat messages. MorphCast’s Zoom extension tracks, in real time, meeting participants’ attention, excitement, and positivity.
But the idea that emotions can be objectively measured or analyzed at all is fantasy, Cushing continues. One expert told Cushing that hundreds of studies show how difficult it is to derive objective analysis on human emotion given its inherent variability; other studies show that AI replicates the biases of the data it’s trained on. In addition, many emotion-AI products base their rubrics on the clinical psychologist Paul Ekman’s theory of basic emotions—but that theory has been widely challenged as oversimplistic and methodologically flawed.
“The global emotion-AI market is expected to triple by 2030, to $9 billion, as the technology becomes more sophisticated and more available,” Cushing writes. “It is not that hard for me to imagine a near future in which workers in all industries are pushed to work not only harder and more, but more happily and more agreeably. This is the new era of employee surveillance: invisible, AI-supercharged, always on.”
🎨: Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic