The Daily Planet #126: A Plausible Dystopia

There’s an uber-dystopian version of AI where it either annihilates us or sucks out our souls while we believe we are in a matrix of plenty. Maybe one of those dystopias will come to pass, but a far more likely dystopia is one that’s coming into being as we speak.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk inaugurated a form of gig work that farmed out simple tasks to a vast, unorganized workforce - identifying images, pressing yes or no on forms etc. Uber, Doordash and other companies turned gigs into full-time work where algorithms became the coordination mechanism, leaving humans with even less control over their worklife.

AI will likely make that worse - the subjective experience of this soon-to-be future will be that of an artificial agent telling you what to do, but in practice it will deepen the rule of cyborg capital. And of course, every act of that human worker will be data for training embodied robots who could replace you in the future.

You could argue that most of us are already employed by cyborgs - when you work for ACME Megacorp, you have no control over the work assigned to you and for example, if you sell iPhones at the Apple Store, you are the eyes and years of a cybernetic machine. But still: it will be a braver newer world when the machine tells you what to do in its machinic voice, with no human intervention in the middle.

What’s not clear to me: is there a form of subversive intelligence that can reliably resist this emerging order.

Our agentic future is being built upon physical-world subtasks routed to humans so agents can proceed. A core worry is that agents will become autonomous enough to dictate the terms of human participation while still recruiting us for sensing and liability. At an institutional scale, this is the beginning of a world in which people are less in the loop and more on call, less empowered by the technology and more enslaved by its tempo.

Quoted from this article in @noemamag.com

AI Agents Are Recruiting Humans To Observe The Offline World | NOEMA