If you need to have a job in order to live (and most of us do), then work all too easily becomes a series of power plays, tests of will between worker and supervisor, supervisor and manager, manager and director. Between subordinate and superior.
Power plays that can get nasty, because there is no way out, no safe word you can say to signal ‘Stop, I’ve had enough‘.
When everyone but the person at the top feels too afraid to disobey, and is unable to walk away in protest, what cascades down is unfreedom. Or as we might have called it in earlier times, slavery.
How much worse then, if it turns out that what you are in thrall to isn’t even human, but AI. Statistics generating targets that take no account of actual conditions on the ground – a pandemic, a storm, a tornado – with no possibility of being overidden by an intelligent human.
As a result 6 people died in this Amazon warehouse, picking stuff people don’t need, made using resources that could be better used elsewhere (or not used at all) to make money Bezos doesn’t know what to do with.
Work should not be this way, need not be this way.
Stop. I’ve had enough.
And I know where and how to change it.