So Satya Nadella shoves Recall in Windows so that it takes screenshots every few seconds. Satya then sits there scratching his head wondering what to do with all these crap pictures his highly innovative product has captured.
Uber is silently watching and is highly impressed by Satya's innovation and decides to pay its large fleet of employees (sorry, no, they aren't employees) to label these pictures. Having nothing better to do, they start labelling these pictures as hot dog or not hot dog.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is outdoors surfing and hunting but doesn't want to be left out from these once in a lifetime innovations. Mark, a very smart individual, has already foreseen where all this innovation is headed. He rushes home and gets busy and throws around money to buy people who can use these labelled pictures to build him a "AI" bot which can tell him how to make korean sauce.
Very impressive bunch of highly intelligent individuals bringing us billions worth of artificial intelligence revolution. Marvellous.
I've always wondered what the world would look like if these huge powerful corporations were run by average people instead of multi-billionaires completely out of touch with what it's like to live in the world. Like have a lottery where everyone gets a single ticket, and the person whose name is drawn gets to be the CEO of Apple for a year, and the 10 next-drawn tickets get to be the senior staff.
I had a recruiter reach out for a company doing Agentic SRE's due to my years of experience as an SRE. Second sentence was describing their mission as making the SRE role no longer necessary for companies. I know if you read between the lines that's the goal of many AI companies, but I was surprised how upfront they were.
I recently browsed engineering job ads at x.ai where they looked for experienced software developers as data labelers for about 60 bucks / hour - so they work on replacing their own profession for a low pay. Funny times.
Somebody really needs to put a stop to what Uber and the like are doing.
They are doing their best to destroy basic labor protections, by circumventing employing their workers. Why are countries just allowing them to clown on established worker protections?
If you want to pay someone to do something employ them. The roll out of the gig economy is only viable because it allows companies to push costs on to the labor force.
> If you want to pay someone to do something employ them.
There is a purpose for casual/contract labor. If I want my lawn mowed, some basement junk hauled away, or my house painted, I want someone on contract/gig to do something for me, but I sure don’t want to hire an employee.
How that person chooses to relate to an employer (whether to be self-employed or work for someone else) is their business, not a concern of mine.
However, from a policy standpoint, I certainly don’t want to prohibit them from being a solo entrepreneur or similar.
So, there’s a reason to allow contract work, even with individuals. Whether you extend that to Uber transportation or to Uber’s new business is a fair question, but “employ them” is not the universal answer to Uber and non-Uber.
Someone should write a "Gig Striker" app (or web site) for mobile phones.
When you sign on you select the company you work for and have access to group chats, forums (by region?). If a thread gets going on striking, the word can be put out on the app and all Uber drivers, just to pick an arbitrary example, refuse to accept calls for one day (again, as an example).
It would be an interesting experiment and tell us a little more about the world and economy we live in today.
Because trust in governments and their ability to execute has been successfully eroded by the holders of private wealth. There are also plenty politicians that simply work for private wealth and deliberately sabotage government from the inside.
The current situation is that even a government that wants to work for the majority of people is too scared to go against a corporation like Uber, or simply doesn't have the means (means being political capital as well as skills within the civil service).
Building that means is a project that lasts beyond election cycles, and needs one elected government to not immediately undo the work of a previous one.
The whole "AI revolution" feels distopian opposite from what I'd naively thought it would do.
My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.
In which only legit people, and never spammers or scammers get me on the phone. Where I don't have to juggle appointments, pdfs, portals, dossier-codes to have my drivers license renewed. In which I can write software and all the boring stuff is taken care of so I need to only do the creative and fun parts. In which I can go surfing, and AI takes care of my taxes, my home, my income and my dishes.
In which tasks like labelling art, driving a taxi, or annotating pdfs is done by machines. So that the humans have time to make art, get transported anywhere for virtually free, or write stories.
But alas, it's the complete opposite. AI companies promise to replace the people that make art, demand ever more humans to stare at screens in order to "generate useful training data" rather than those humans spending time with each other, or spend time in inspiring surrounding. AI increases robo calling a hundred fold. AI generates more email, content, slop, and other noise that I manually have to wade through to get the actual info.
I get where you're coming from — the naively thought part. You may though just have to get a good deal more cynical. Perhaps you already are.
Tech fascinated me as a kid—and, because of my age, we're talking Apollo-era tech, promises of a moon base, the introduction of the Metric system is U.S. schools, elementary school libraries full of science books for kids on chemistry, electricity, model rocketry, etc.
I have come around to see, as I get older, that tech for tech's sake is often a hollow thing. Its biggest cheerleaders are (of course) the ones that stand to make a lot of money from it.
Change for change's sake follows in stride—is disruptive, unasked for, often benefits a few.
I dislike my modern cynicism on tech but it has also served me well.
> My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.
I can't quite square people seriously believing such things, it seems like it must be wishful thinking crossed with denial. We have more than 200 years of technology taking away the hard and dangerous jobs and it hasn't been playing out that way at all, so why should the latest kind of automation have a dramatically different effect on society?
A hydraulic excavator can do the work of dozens of men with shovels, dozens of times faster too, but that hasn't lead to easy lives of luxury for the sort of men that would have been breaking their backs with shovels. They all had to get other manual labor jobs, because they weren't the capital that got to own and profit from the new machines. The best we can hope for is that when all the women manually spinning thread get replaced by factories, that at least some of them will get to have new factory jobs and the rest will at least be offset by society at large benefiting from clothing so cheap that even the poorest people can own more than one outfit.
Funny. I don't claim to be a person of extraordinary intellect or a tech-visionary. However, the very first time in my life I heard the argument "robots are bad because they will take all the jobs" I immediately realized "oh, so 'who will own the robots' is the question we have to think carefully about". This was in the mid-nineties and I was about 10.
>My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.
That didn't happen at any previous industrial revolution step either. Instead work for humans became more mechanical and soul-crushing.
Farmers ended up having to work on some factory line for 12 hours. Small store owners and employees were turned into huge chain cogs. People "freed" from household work, were send to the cubicle.
I always believe technological advance eventually bring us to the point that 1) the elites have total control of all resources, and 2) impossible for ordinary people to rise up and clean the slate.
As someone on both sides of the issue I think this is good. I worked in tech my whole life and then drove an Uber in retirement. Uber is basically saying "We're partnering with Waymo to eliminate drivers, so here's something to help pay you while you transition to another job."
We always where going to, a star trek like society benefits the maximum number of people at the expense of curtailing the excesses of the wealthiest people.
The wealthy people don't like that, why would they and since they have a disproportionate amount of power via their wealth they oppose it successfully.
They'll keep the bread and circuses going and keep refining what is the minimum amount of bread they can get away with until they cross the line and then things get whacky for a bit, it resets and then they start taking the bread away again.
"Game the system", ha ha. Pretty sure "employers" that push for a gig economy are doing a bit of gaming themselves. Unionless, benefitless, interchangeable employees…
>in most regions Uber drivers are being paid an hourly wage so yeah I think this makes sense.
I did not know this. Is this verifiable? I thought the whole reason Uber and other “gig” businesses work is because they can pay piecemeal and not have people classified as employees. There were multiple high profile court cases and even attempts to legislate that Uber drivers are employees, but I believe in the US they are still independent contractors, hence they can work for whoever they want, whenever they want.
An Uber driver doing DoorDash or Lyft between Uber work would be working for a direct competitor, whereas an Uber driver doing errands that require a car from TaskRabbit would not be working for a direct competitor.
>> Should your employer tolerate you working another job while you are being paid to do yours?
When the company fights hard & dirty for decades to classify you as a contractor to externalize the majority of the costs in their business model? Yes.
you can stop working at any time, so that's what they do, and then start working for another company. Any employer can't have a problem with working a second job, so long as you're not violating a non-compete.
Frankly, if you are driving around doing your job by simply being available, you are doing your job. If you are, e.g. not doing your job by picking up door dash and then an Uber that takes you out of the way and you deliver the food in an even colder state than if you drove to the DoorDash destination directly, then no, you are not doing your job and it should be apparent to DoorDash that you are not performing as is expected.
But what is your apparent assumption that Uber, dorodash, or any other employer owns your body or time. Frankly, that's both a holdover and also a bit of a crack that reveals that what we call slavery, is really just exploitation and abuse and it comes in many forms. Today it takes many other forms, but one of them is what you may unintentionally have internalized, that when you are "working for someone" you are effectively owned by them and you are not free to do anything but what you are told when you are "on the clock", like a part time slave, only with worse benefits.
It's an odd characteristic of seemingly all of humanity to varying degrees, but for whatever reason, one set of humans is not only exploited, but often even participates in their own exploitation (be it the "gig-economy" types or the corporate cheerleader types) while another set of humans enjoy the fruits of that exploitation and facilitate it with things like abusive, narcissistic manipulative language like "freedom of choice" and "democracy" and "gig-economy" and any other of the manipulative, word-smithed terms and buzzwords the PRopaganda people come up with.
If you want to keep your jobs, then it’s time to poison that well. Take their money, and provide critically flawed feedback to hobble their machines. (Insert “bodies upon the gears” speech by Mario Salvo at Berkeley)
jinbachman|4 months ago
So Satya Nadella shoves Recall in Windows so that it takes screenshots every few seconds. Satya then sits there scratching his head wondering what to do with all these crap pictures his highly innovative product has captured.
Uber is silently watching and is highly impressed by Satya's innovation and decides to pay its large fleet of employees (sorry, no, they aren't employees) to label these pictures. Having nothing better to do, they start labelling these pictures as hot dog or not hot dog.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is outdoors surfing and hunting but doesn't want to be left out from these once in a lifetime innovations. Mark, a very smart individual, has already foreseen where all this innovation is headed. He rushes home and gets busy and throws around money to buy people who can use these labelled pictures to build him a "AI" bot which can tell him how to make korean sauce.
Very impressive bunch of highly intelligent individuals bringing us billions worth of artificial intelligence revolution. Marvellous.
ryandrake|4 months ago
oefrha|4 months ago
That said I shouldn’t laugh, I get at least weekly offers in my mailbox to make up to $50/hr or something to help train models to replace programmers…
abuani|4 months ago
siva7|4 months ago
constantcrying|4 months ago
They are doing their best to destroy basic labor protections, by circumventing employing their workers. Why are countries just allowing them to clown on established worker protections?
If you want to pay someone to do something employ them. The roll out of the gig economy is only viable because it allows companies to push costs on to the labor force.
sokoloff|4 months ago
There is a purpose for casual/contract labor. If I want my lawn mowed, some basement junk hauled away, or my house painted, I want someone on contract/gig to do something for me, but I sure don’t want to hire an employee.
How that person chooses to relate to an employer (whether to be self-employed or work for someone else) is their business, not a concern of mine.
However, from a policy standpoint, I certainly don’t want to prohibit them from being a solo entrepreneur or similar.
So, there’s a reason to allow contract work, even with individuals. Whether you extend that to Uber transportation or to Uber’s new business is a fair question, but “employ them” is not the universal answer to Uber and non-Uber.
JKCalhoun|4 months ago
When you sign on you select the company you work for and have access to group chats, forums (by region?). If a thread gets going on striking, the word can be put out on the app and all Uber drivers, just to pick an arbitrary example, refuse to accept calls for one day (again, as an example).
It would be an interesting experiment and tell us a little more about the world and economy we live in today.
noir_lord|4 months ago
Money - directly towards politicians.
Money - buys them the best lawyers for when they sit down with the government lawyers.
Money - allows them to move faster than the legal system can catch up.
Money - they focus all of their resources on doing the things we'd prefer they didn't, governments have other things to do deal with.
phatfish|4 months ago
The current situation is that even a government that wants to work for the majority of people is too scared to go against a corporation like Uber, or simply doesn't have the means (means being political capital as well as skills within the civil service).
Building that means is a project that lasts beyond election cycles, and needs one elected government to not immediately undo the work of a previous one.
berkes|4 months ago
My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.
In which only legit people, and never spammers or scammers get me on the phone. Where I don't have to juggle appointments, pdfs, portals, dossier-codes to have my drivers license renewed. In which I can write software and all the boring stuff is taken care of so I need to only do the creative and fun parts. In which I can go surfing, and AI takes care of my taxes, my home, my income and my dishes.
In which tasks like labelling art, driving a taxi, or annotating pdfs is done by machines. So that the humans have time to make art, get transported anywhere for virtually free, or write stories.
But alas, it's the complete opposite. AI companies promise to replace the people that make art, demand ever more humans to stare at screens in order to "generate useful training data" rather than those humans spending time with each other, or spend time in inspiring surrounding. AI increases robo calling a hundred fold. AI generates more email, content, slop, and other noise that I manually have to wade through to get the actual info.
JKCalhoun|4 months ago
Tech fascinated me as a kid—and, because of my age, we're talking Apollo-era tech, promises of a moon base, the introduction of the Metric system is U.S. schools, elementary school libraries full of science books for kids on chemistry, electricity, model rocketry, etc.
I have come around to see, as I get older, that tech for tech's sake is often a hollow thing. Its biggest cheerleaders are (of course) the ones that stand to make a lot of money from it.
Change for change's sake follows in stride—is disruptive, unasked for, often benefits a few.
I dislike my modern cynicism on tech but it has also served me well.
mikkupikku|4 months ago
I can't quite square people seriously believing such things, it seems like it must be wishful thinking crossed with denial. We have more than 200 years of technology taking away the hard and dangerous jobs and it hasn't been playing out that way at all, so why should the latest kind of automation have a dramatically different effect on society?
A hydraulic excavator can do the work of dozens of men with shovels, dozens of times faster too, but that hasn't lead to easy lives of luxury for the sort of men that would have been breaking their backs with shovels. They all had to get other manual labor jobs, because they weren't the capital that got to own and profit from the new machines. The best we can hope for is that when all the women manually spinning thread get replaced by factories, that at least some of them will get to have new factory jobs and the rest will at least be offset by society at large benefiting from clothing so cheap that even the poorest people can own more than one outfit.
ekjhgkejhgk|4 months ago
coldtea|4 months ago
That didn't happen at any previous industrial revolution step either. Instead work for humans became more mechanical and soul-crushing.
Farmers ended up having to work on some factory line for 12 hours. Small store owners and employees were turned into huge chain cogs. People "freed" from household work, were send to the cubicle.
indymike|4 months ago
loloquwowndueo|4 months ago
markus_zhang|4 months ago
We are very close to it.
JodieBenitez|4 months ago
labrador|4 months ago
ulfw|4 months ago
geetee|4 months ago
abbadadda|4 months ago
intended|4 months ago
noir_lord|4 months ago
The wealthy people don't like that, why would they and since they have a disproportionate amount of power via their wealth they oppose it successfully.
They'll keep the bread and circuses going and keep refining what is the minimum amount of bread they can get away with until they cross the line and then things get whacky for a bit, it resets and then they start taking the bread away again.
mrbungie|4 months ago
anonzzzies|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
Havoc|4 months ago
dangus|4 months ago
seydor|4 months ago
black_13|4 months ago
[deleted]
shironandonon_|4 months ago
They can answer support calls too.
Despite getting an Uber hourly wage many game the system by taking DoorDash and Lyft orders while on the job.
Should your employer tolerate you working another job while you are being paid to do yours?
JKCalhoun|4 months ago
cookiengineer|4 months ago
That argument goes both ways:
Should your employer be able to have you on an exclusive contract with a salary so low that you cannot pay your own bills?
Probably not.
The fallacy in your argument is that you're assuming that people like to work. They don't, they do it out of necessity.
lotsofpulp|4 months ago
I did not know this. Is this verifiable? I thought the whole reason Uber and other “gig” businesses work is because they can pay piecemeal and not have people classified as employees. There were multiple high profile court cases and even attempts to legislate that Uber drivers are employees, but I believe in the US they are still independent contractors, hence they can work for whoever they want, whenever they want.
dawnerd|4 months ago
tzs|4 months ago
An Uber driver doing DoorDash or Lyft between Uber work would be working for a direct competitor, whereas an Uber driver doing errands that require a car from TaskRabbit would not be working for a direct competitor.
skeeter2020|4 months ago
When the company fights hard & dirty for decades to classify you as a contractor to externalize the majority of the costs in their business model? Yes.
notepad0x90|4 months ago
hopelite|4 months ago
But what is your apparent assumption that Uber, dorodash, or any other employer owns your body or time. Frankly, that's both a holdover and also a bit of a crack that reveals that what we call slavery, is really just exploitation and abuse and it comes in many forms. Today it takes many other forms, but one of them is what you may unintentionally have internalized, that when you are "working for someone" you are effectively owned by them and you are not free to do anything but what you are told when you are "on the clock", like a part time slave, only with worse benefits.
It's an odd characteristic of seemingly all of humanity to varying degrees, but for whatever reason, one set of humans is not only exploited, but often even participates in their own exploitation (be it the "gig-economy" types or the corporate cheerleader types) while another set of humans enjoy the fruits of that exploitation and facilitate it with things like abusive, narcissistic manipulative language like "freedom of choice" and "democracy" and "gig-economy" and any other of the manipulative, word-smithed terms and buzzwords the PRopaganda people come up with.
nativeit|4 months ago
Edit: Berkeley, not Kent State