Smart Productivity Software Means Pink Slip Flood

October 9, 2023

Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.

Ready for some excitement, you under 50s?

Soon, workers may be spared the pain of training their replacements. Consciously, anyway. Wired reports, “Your Boss’s Spyware Could Train AI to Replace You.” Researcher Carl Frey’s landmark 2013 prediction that AI could threated half of US jobs has not yet come to pass. Now that current tools like ChatGPT have proven (so far) less accurate and self-sufficient than advertised, some workers are breathing a sigh of relief. Not so fast, warns journalist Thor Benson. It is the growingly pervasive “productivity” (aka monitoring) software we need to be concerned about. Benson writes:

“Enter corporate spyware, invasive monitoring apps that allow bosses to keep close tabs on everything their employees are doing—collecting reams of data that could come into play here in interesting ways. Corporations, which are monitoring their employees on a large scale, are now having workers utilize AI tools more frequently, and many questions remain regarding how the many AI tools that are currently being developed are being trained. Put all of this together and there’s the potential that companies could use data they’ve harvested from workers—by monitoring them and having them interact with AI that can learn from them—to develop new AI programs that could actually replace them. If your boss can figure out exactly how you do your job, and an AI program is learning from the data you’re producing, then eventually your boss might be able to just have the program do the job instead.”

Even at companies that do not use spyware, employees may unwittingly train their AI replacements simply by generating data as part of their work. To make matters worse, because it gets neither salary nor benefits, an algorithm need not exceed or even match a human’s performance to land the job.

So what can we do? We could retrain workers but, as MIT economics professor David Autor notes, that is not one of the US’s strong suits. Or we could take a cue from the Industrial Revolution: Frey points to Britain’s Poor Laws, which gave financial relief to workers whose jobs became obsolete back then. Hmm, we wonder: How would a similar measure fair in the current US Congress?

Cynthia Murrell, October 9, 2023

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Business strategy, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.