Your online consumer behaviour, Facebook "likes", web browsing history, music and video downloads and more, will be analysed. Pseudo-scientists believe that with enough data, a worker's behaviour can be predicted and employers will pay to ensure a predictable workforce. Unlike the plot of the film Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise plays a "pre-crime" officer who hunts down murder suspects before they can kill, software cannot predict human behaviour. But it can create your profile for an employer or recruiter when you apply for job or a raise. Is this information valid or replicable? No. Does it contravene the Privacy Act? Of course – but that's never stopped recruiters, software developers or their ilk before. Experience, education and merit, plays no part in the magical symbiosis of big data and personality. Organisations leading this brave new world call it disruptive. I call it deluded. Neither psychometrics or people analytics can measure inner experience. A key aim of the tests is to escape human subjectivity but of course psychometric tests are designed by humans and are packed full of bias. Online dating systems broadly use the same operating algorithms. If you're looking for Miss Personality, try a beauty contest.

Often the real problem isn't always an individual's "lack of fit" but management's lack of capability. The 1950s saw the explosion of technocratic possibility. Companies used IQ tests, math tests, vocabulary tests and professional-aptitude tests, to make the "right hire". Some of the tests were based on dodgy psychological theories, while others were designed to assess mental illness. Some are still used today. They measure conformity, not potential. This is not a passing fad. At least six public high schools in NSW conduct "roll call" by scanning student fingerprints. Rooty Hill High School scans its 1060 students for a biometric rollbook as does the Georges River College Oatley Senior Campus. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority plans to implement computerised marking for NAPLAN exams in 2017. Will the computers also mark creative writing essays? Can our essential self – our talents and skills, traits and quirks, education and experience, those all-important passions and hobbies – be reduced to a series of data points and correlations? No. This brave new world suffers from three major flaws.

Even though a candidate's characteristics may correlate with a high-performing hypothetical employee, correlation does not imply causality. Big data analysis is good at detecting correlations but it does not tells us which correlations are meaningful. Much of the online data analysed is historic. As any statistics major will tell you, past performance does not guarantee future performance. The real benefit of psychometric testing and people analytics is that they're cheap. Winston Churchill would have "failed" a battery of psychometric tests. He drank heavily, was argumentative, hated committees, suffered from depression and worked in bed until midday. Yet in 1940 he alone roused the British people to stand against an all-conquering Nazi Germany. With 60 seconds of fuel left, off course and flying over a boulder field on the moon, the Commander of Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong, did what no personality test thought he would do. He turned away from his instruments and looked out the window of the lunar module to find a safe place to land. How very human. This is not a technological attack. It is a political attack with far-reaching ramifications. Those of us born after World War II can still travel back along the mystic bonds of memory, to a time when we used tools, rather than tools used us. We willingly or unwillingly sacrifice eight hours of our liberty going to work. There's no need to sacrifice our humanity too. Malcolm King works in generational change and is an Adelaide writer.