Cyberboss

September 9, 2024
The “algorithmic Panopticon” is already here, argues journalist Gent in this foreboding debut exploration of “stringent” managerial practices that rely on AI. Through firsthand accounts from employees, Gent shows how AI isn’t replacing workers but monitoring and controlling them by taking over “discrete sections of the work process... at the level of decision-making” and setting “unachievable” productivity targets (in one case cited by Gent, warehouse workers were forced to urinate in bottles because the AI left no time for bathroom breaks). Gent describes how distribution center workers are forced to log their work using various employer-owned devices—including vehicles, scanners, and cell phones—which then determine what the next step of their task will be. Later chapters explore how “algorithmic management” is destabilizing even for supervisors, whose leadership has become “secondary to the strategic vision of impersonal software.” Gent also criticizes unions for taking a softball approach to these developments that amounts to little more than helping the algorithm function better via worker training, instead of helping workers take control of the algorithm. Though somewhat bogged down by deep dives into managerial theory, Gent’s account still has bite (he calls an official tour of an Amazon fulfillment center the “tightly curated North Korea Tourism Board version of the warehouse”). It’s an unsettling glimpse of the new normal in America’s workplaces.