the dehumanization machine

About a month ago, a delivery driver doing work for Amazon shared a post to a drivers' forum on Reddit. The driver titled the post, "Try to tell me when i can move my own mouth? I'm out." His boss announced in a meeting that drivers could no longer sing along to the radio during their shifts. "Amazon is trying to really cut down on distracted driving," he said they told him. Cameras in their trucks tracked the eyes and mouths of drivers even when they were on break or off duty.

I don't know if this story is true. For their part, Amazon denied it. They did at one time deny making people work in 100°F (38°C) heat, which turned out to be true. They denied that workers had to urinate in bottles during shifts to keep up productivity. They admitted their statement denying these reports was false. Amazon has made a lot of creepy decisions about how to manage their workforce. Booths for workers to cry in without leaving the floor. Wristbands that track the movement of workers' hands. Thousands of people fired for not packing fast enough. One Amazon worker died after a forklift crushed him. Regulators fined Amazon $28K because he hadn't received the necessary forklift training. The governor of Indiana wiped the violations clean in a bid to land an Amazon headquarters in his state. The state declared that the worker was responsible for his own death. The company paid nothing.

In a lot of ways, as a business, Amazon isn't that much of an outlier. Lots of companies cycle through layoffs, return to work orders, and unsafe conditions. But these stories got me thinking: humans are so inconvenient to modern society. Wouldn't profits be much higher if we didn't need them?

what we lose

People today think of the Luddites as a group that shunned modern technology. My college roommate called himself a Luddite because he didn't like texting. The people who took this name were skilled knitters and textile workers from the early 1800s. They began destroying the mechanized looms taking over their industry. They did this with jokes, swagger, and at least a couple big hammers. Even people familiar with this story might not know that it wasn't the machines they hated. Instead, they wanted high-quality machines that made quality items. They wanted the people operating those machines to receive training and good wages. When profiteers saw they could underpay a new generation of laborers, they took it. So the Luddites wrecked factories across England. The Luddites were pro-labor, not anti-machine.

How does the mentality of those factory owners show up in our world today? I see it in the rush to incorporate so-called AI into everything. Art that used to rely on an artist's training and talent now takes stolen images and a few specific prompts. People can generate pages of text, even books, that replace the work a human used to do. I could generate these essays in a few minutes. Instead, like an idiot, I spend a few hours each week writing something that's meaningful to me.

If I want, I can have an app attend meetings on my behalf. One day I might even have an app that can ask, "could this meeting have been an email?" But digital assistants are only the beginning. Robot soldiers, fast food workers, managers, and CEOs are a few development cycles away. Every industry counts its workforce as one of its biggest "drains" on profit. What happens to all the people who lose their jobs with nothing to replace them? Wage stagnation is a widespread issue and very few jobs are truly safe.

checking out from life

Another technology trend is humans removing themselves from their own lives. I mentioned earlier how I don't have to go to meetings anymore. People everywhere should generally do less work than they do. But what about an algorithm that picks my music for me? An entire social network where I'm the only human in a sea of bots that all want to talk to me?

Rob Horning wrote about a new AI that lives on your body like a carnation in a lapel. The Rabbit R1 can control all the apps in your busy life. Its creators designed it to intuits your needs even before you know them yourself. He writes:

A frictionless existence appeals to me the most when things feel hard. After a long day I find myself scrolling on my phone with the TV playing in the background. I've "watched" more than one multi-hour youtube video about a topic I don't care much about. The outside world is awful scary. We've got medical bills, hurricanes, genocides, unplugging, disconnecting, disassociating. We have to find our humanity—we have to plug back in—before it's too late. How can we avoid this fate?

how to resist

Glorify the imperfect. There was a recent google ad that shook up a lot of people. In the commercial, a father asks a chatbot to help his daughter write a letter to an athlete she admired. "I'm pretty good with words," he says, "but this has to be just right." So many people worry about screwing things up. We may not know what to say when a friend asks for help.

Nobody wants to be the friend who gives bad advice. But what about the friend who gives imperfect advice? Flawed, limited by our own perceptions and beliefs, but human through and through. Why should we ask a language model to generate a sentence that is the likeliest string of words to exist? The best sentence is one that meets a moment rather than ignores it.

Strive for impact. I've been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' new book The Message. Coates says that one of his formative lessons on writing, from the rappers he loved as a kid, is that it should haunt. He writes,

Every response I see from a chatbot is the opposite of this kind of haunt. It's affectless, friendly but empty, too cheerful to be really living through the 2020s. Humans can be the opposite of that. We have passion and interests and some of us talk a lot with our hands. We shouldn't need to minimize ourselves in the workplace to fit in. We can stand up for things that aren't fair. We don't have to live within a status quo that serves so few people.

Hold on to empathy. These days it can feel like society's capacity for empathy is dwindling. But it could be that what we're feeling is overwhelm. There's so much to care about, in our own worlds and in others'. But we're humans, connecting to each other. There's nobody else like us, but that's true for everyone else too. We're alike in our uniqueness. We may not know a person killed in a wildfire or flood. We may not know a child killed in an airstrike, or one killed while working at a poultry plant. But they are humans like we are.

The writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel once wrote, "We must not see any person as an abstraction. We must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph." This concept, that every person is a world as precious as the one we live on, is not unique to one culture or tradition. We are all beautiful in our complexity. This week marks a year in the ongoing genocide happening in Gaza. No matter your politics, american-made weapons ended thousands of universes in the past year. Apartheid is always wrong. Genocide is always wrong. No amount of overwhelm will change that.

don't disconnect

I spent so many years of my life just making it through. Thinking about the future and not the present. What did that help me do? What did I lose trying to get through my own life? There are many more important things in life than a few corporations raking in billions. I'm going to try to savor them. I'm going to hold onto my humanity for as long as I can.