Science fiction has long imagined a future in which humans constantly interact with robots and intelligent machines. This future is already happening in warehouses and manufacturing businesses. Other workers use virtual or augmented reality as part of their employment training, to assist them in performing their job, or to interact with clients. And lots of workers are under automated surveillance from their employers.

All that automation yields data that can be used to analyze workers’ performance. Those analyses, whether done by humans or software programs, may affect who is hired, fired, promoted, and given raises. Some artificial intelligence programs can mine and manipulate the data to predict future actions, such as who is likely to quit their job, or to diagnose medical conditions.

If your job doesn’t currently involve these types of technologies, it likely will in the very near future. This worries me me—a labor and employment law scholar who researches the role of technology in the workplace—because unless significant changes are made to American workplace laws, these sorts of surveillance and privacy invasions will be perfectly legal.

New technology disrupting old workplace laws

The U.S.’s regulation of the workplace has long been an outlier among much of the world. Especially for private, nonunionized workers, the U.S. largely allows companies and workers to figure out the terms and conditions of work on their own.

In general, for all but the most in-demand...

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