Insiders at Meta and other companies leaked to us about bosses using AI to spy on them. In tech, AI spies on workers, copies their work, and trains bots to replace them. At a call center, “Emotion AI” evaluates the way a nurse talks, and tells her she doesn’t have empathy.
Video by Mae Ryan and Meg Herschlein
TRANSCRIPT
“KEVIN,” LAID-OFF META EMPLOYEE: I hate everything Meta has done. I hate that I work for psychopaths. I despise that I’m part of the machine.
MAE RYAN, MORE PERFECT UNION: Workers inside Big Tech companies are getting increasingly disillusioned with the world they helped build.
“SAM,” RETIRED MICROSOFT EMPLOYEE: I can’t keep selling my soul like this. This is a prison in its own way.
RYAN: Tech CEOs are going all in on the future of [artificial intelligence], even if they think it could eventually kill us all. But this doomerism is obscuring what AI is doing to workers right now. So I spoke to over a dozen tech workers to hear what it’s like on the inside. These are not their real voices.
“PETER,” META WORKER: Zuck thinking that we could replace 60 percent of the company with AI agents. It’s like you’re insane.
“SAM,” MICROSOFT WORKER: It doesn’t matter how much money you make for them, they will turn on you.
RYAN: And the more people I spoke to, the more I realized something weirder was going on.
“LUCY,” AMAZON WORKERWe didn’t really know how, but I knew somebody was watching.
“PETER,” META WORKER: This thing records your screen, records clicks. It just seems like their goal is to automate us away.
RYAN: Tech workers aren’t the only ones being watched.About two thirds of all workers in the US say they are being surveilled by technology known as Bossware. And now it’s getting supercharged by AI.
CHRIS SING, AMAZON DELIVERY DRIVER, YOUTUBE: “Here at Amazon, they only treat us by the metrics and numbers. They don’t give a shit about you as a human.”
RYAN: So I wanted to know, how is this AI-powered surveillance affecting workers today? Is all this worker data going to train our AI replacements? And what does Bossware think of me?
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