What if your body becomes your job?
First we sold our strength.
Then we sold our thoughts.
Now, we’re being asked to sell our feeling.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
As AI automates thinking, what’s left is what AI cannot do: sense. Interpret mood. Navigate tension. Feel the vibe in a room. The only way for machines to learn how to interact with humans is to train on our emotions, our physiology, our presence.
Your nervous system is becoming a data stream.
Already, platforms track breath, pulse, posture. Wearables record heart rate variability and skin conductivity.
Cameras read micro-expressions. Mood-tracking apps sell anonymized signals to train machine learning models. Every sigh, every blink, every spike of cortisol — monetized. In this new economy, your sensation is becoming labor.
And labor, historically, has never been neutral.
Just as factory workers once traded sweat for wages, now bodies may trade their signals for passive income. Stay calm? Get a reward. Generate useful training data? Earn a credit. Be present — literally, physiologically present — and you get paid. Don’t opt in? The machine learns less. You get less. The divide widens.
A new class structure could emerge:
- The sensed — bodies constantly monitored, subtly nudged, rewarded for their regulation.
- The unsensed — those who opt out, disconnected from incentives, outside the system.
- The owners — those who profit from the data, but rarely give their own.
Surveillance becomes subsidy.
Sensing becomes income.
And still — dignity hangs in the balance.
Perhaps these are simply different words for what has always been. But this time, we can build it better.
We can imagine alternatives:
A sensing union that sets the terms of biometric labor. A new UBI model based on emotional data sovereignty. Digital infrastructures that protect your nervous system as sacred, not extractable.
But we have to name it now.
Because if the body becomes labor, and we treat it like we treated labor before — commodified, anonymized, owned by someone else — we will lose something vital. Not just privacy. Not just control.
We’ll lose presence itself.
Next Up: The Sensing Economy, Vol 5. — The Biometric Commons
We ask what kind of civic, ethical, and economic structures can protect our right to feel — and how to build a shared sensory future that doesn’t just extract, but heals.
The Senseai Institute 