The debate raging about AI’s future consequences, with a complete AI automation apocalypse on one side and a resplendent AI utopia on the other, has overlooked one tiny detail: the tech is already making workers’ lives hell at this very minute.
According to the Guardian, at least one-third of UK employers already report using “bossware,” meaning employee monitoring software increasingly integrated with AI. In the US, that number is even higher, with an estimated 61 percent of workplaces using AI analytics software to calculate worker productivity.
This kind of management-by-software has long been prevalent in industrial society to some extent — since the 2010s, Amazon warehouse workers have had to deal with hand-scanners that track their bathroom breaks, for example — but the rise of AI means bosses are increasingly utilizing the latest and greatest machine learning tools to maximize worker productivity.
As Royal Docks School of Business and Law professor Nazrul Islam pinned pined in a recent editorial in the Guardian, the most immediate threat to the workers of the world isn’t mass automation kicking people out of the workplace, but the crushing effects of AI on those within it.
The consequences are numerous: it engenders a widening workplace skill gap, erasure of workplace autonomy, and ever-worsening conditions. As Islam puts it, “many jobs will remain in the future, but they will be more pressured, more fragmented and less human.”
Sure enough, AI is already degrading workplace conditions around the world. In the US, fast food workers and Amazon drivers are increasingly surveilled by these systems. Office workers are being coerced to work harder with AI and subject themselves to constant AI monitoring — or else find themselves on the streets in one of the most brutal hiring markets since the Great Recession.
“The choice about how AI will reshape work is not being made in Silicon Valley boardrooms or summit speeches,” Islam observes. “It is being made right now, workplace by workplace, across Britain and around the world.”
So though the jury may still be out on whether mass AI immiseration is in our future, don’t forget to check in with the present, where there are plenty of horrors lurking in the mundanity of each and every shift.
More on workplace surveillance: Amazon Tells Driver to Keep Delivering Packages Amid Raging Wildfire
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