> The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses.<p>Well, that's what the bosses think. Same way "hybrid" work plans just became a backdoor policy for RTO. But "the point" of AI is just to generate text, regardless of how the subtext around it changes.
One article inaccuracy: Amazon treats <i>all</i> of their employees (from the warehouse to Day One) like cattle. Bidets? Chefs?!? If you didn't have to make the free pot of coffee yourself as you ponder which café to fork over money to, consider yourself blessed. In Ruby/Dawson, you couldn't find a bathroom to save your life at times (more dignified to sob quietly on a toilet than a desk as you dealt with the brutal reality of stack ranks and agendas I suppose).<p>The pay scales differently, no doubt, but only because Amazon has to in order to be competitive (I still remember the recruiter saying "even Jeff himself doesnt have a base pay beyond $160k"). If they could get away with making pee break opportunities miniscule, rest assured they would.
I rather enjoyed the article "Vocational Awe and Librarianship" which was embedded in this one. It's kind of a formal explanation of what Mike Judge was trying to say in Office Space via the travails of Jeniffer Aniston's character (pieces of flair) and what David Simon hinted at with "the job will not save you" line in The Wire.<p>I wish twenty-year old me would've read that article, would've stopped me from a lot of fake pressure and heartburn.
When all this happens you cannot help but see that populism will need to rise again from the ashes as a class warfare is under way as the article points out.<p>The current administration will consider any action against billionaires as domestic terrorism as witnessed with Tesla's recent boycotts despite this happening all around the world against American's richest companies. Much of America is in the denial phase right now but the writing is on the wall already.<p>I'm willing to bet most people don't want to work in factories again with Chinese conditions even as Secretary of Commerce Lutnick professes it so but the mega corporations demand the corporate security along with the obvious national security reasons for detaching from China.<p>As billionaires lust to take more of the pie without one ounce of support or laws or worker rights, against AI that enshittifies jobs and turns white collar work into a race towards the bottom, the populist class has no choice but to fight this head on.<p>As the government and businesses use AI to target the resistance as they take away rights, benefits, and standards of living you have to ask ourselves what side of history you want to be on because history shows these things tend to come to a massive clash. Power vs the people. Rights vs profits. Morality vs corruption.<p>We live in revolutionary times, thanks for the article share.