Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

This idea that intellection is nothing more than pattern matching is silly and needs to die. Conceptual understanding entails more than just pattern matching.

As a skeptic, the one-sided description of mental health, and the obvious parallel to a "always-on slave collar" jumped out. Is there legitimate use for this kind of employment technology?

As is so common, those most incentivized to produce and deploy such a thing, are the exact character that is not to be trusted with such an invasive machine. It just screams of a need to regulate, to my western culture eye.

Internal company communcation channels are open to inspection by the company. Whether that company wants to use AI or pay for agents to read ever internal email is up to them. Want your bosses not to hear you rant about a new corporate policy? Don't sent such comments via company email.

We had our chance to push back against company surveillance well over a decade ago, and nobody except privacy advocates like me seemed to give a shit. Some very close friends actually told (after the company for "saftey reasons" started using RFID tracking to track our movements throughout the building using our ID cards) that I was being "paranoid" by suggesting that at some point it would be openly surveiling employee activities like bathroom breaks, watercooler conversation, etc.

Please don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that it's too late, that we've lost, and that we get what we deserve (although such might be true), but I am pessimistic that we could ever reverse this at this late stage point. The cancer has long metastasized and buried itself deeply into every nook and cranny.

I don't know if it will work, but this is what I think we should do:

1. Refuse to work at companies that do the most invasive surveillance. This means a lot more of your options are gonna be to work for yourself or for a startup.

2. Spread the word in conversations and stuff (when appropriate. Don't be obnoxious and shove people's face in it cause that won't serve any purpose except alienating them). Seek to educate and inform, not to evangelize or argue (though such things do have their place, but use discretion).

3. Shame the companies who do surveillance. I'm not saying be obnoxious or in-your-face about it because that won't do anything other than make you an asshole, but it's absolutely worth bringing it up in a reasonable, fact-based way when appropriate. I've told recruiters that I won't work for because of this.

4. Live your values and try not to do business with these companies, though such can be hard when many have near-monopoly status or a hard-to-avoid position. A full boycott is admirable, but you gotta live your life too. Just try to continually re-evaluate alternatives and vote with your $.

Anticipating someone dismissing me as an "r/antiwork" person (yes, people on the internet and even Hacker News do routinely make ridiculous assumptions about people based on zero knowledge other than one comment they just read), I actually think ignoring this helps the antiwork people by giving them valid points about the abuse. If you don't think they're right, then you should be very much on my side here because if nothing happens, they will eventually be right.

>>>> “It won’t have names of people, to protect the privacy,” Schumann said. Rather, he said, clients will see that “maybe the workforce over the age of 40 in this part of the United States is seeing the changes to [a] policy very negatively because of the cost, but everybody else outside of that age group and location sees it positively because it impacts them in a different way.”

QFT. It's always the over-40 who are under suspicion.

Disclosure: Old.