IMR · From Human Capital to Intelligence Management: Data-driven Economy and Brain-Computer Interfaces

Along with artificial general intelligence (AGI), the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) is heralded as the new frontier for the data-driven economy. It stands at the forefront of an arms race involving the world’s most valuable companies and powerful states. However, social science scholarship on neurotechnology has largely overlooked core socioeconomic aspects of non-medical applications of BCI, such as their impact on productivity, labour processes, business models, and data extraction schemes. Socioeconomics and critical data studies, on the other hand, have not yet addressed BCI. This research innovates by approaching neurotechnology as a new frontier for data accumulation and exploring how its application in training and work environments connects to a broader societal change wrought by the digital economy: the crisis of the human capital paradigm. It proposes that the demise of human capital is giving way to an emerging alternative paradigm for governing the workforce, defining it as the ‘Intelligence Management Regime (IMR)’ – a new (datafied) ecology of competencies and practices driven by explorations in neuro-enhancement and novel complementarities between humans and machines. At the crux of these developments is a thorough revision of the socially dominant definition of (human) intelligence, which our research will explore. IMR will employ documentary and fieldwork research with major global computational neuroscientific projects, leading neurotech companies, as well as businesses, consumers, and workers using these artefacts in daily activities. In a globalised economy, the investigation requires a comparison of distinct geoeconomic realities where neurotech diffusion is more advanced: the US, Europe, and China. By advancing a new understanding of what are deemed subjective and objective dimensions in human interactions with technical objects in labour settings, the project prompts path-changing conceptual developments in social theory.