What’s to Come of All This Tracking “Who We Are”? The Intelligence Example

Despite increased requirements and encouragements to track what we do and how we do it in different areas of our lives, from job performance to sleep and diet, evidence suggests that constant tracking might not help that much with health and well-being and instead might have dire social consequences. Johnson uses human intelligence, which has been the object of efforts to track for more than 100 years, as an example of tracking’s social consequences. The author suggests the potential for tracking activities to lead society into a dystopian future, much like the one portrayed in Huxley’s Brave New World.

Robert Goldstone of the Percepts and Concepts Laboratory at Indiana University and editor of the APS journal Current Directions in Psychological Science interviews Wendy Johnson, Professor in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.