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An Unpleasant AI Thought

I was thinking about the applications that companies put on your work laptop. Most serve a business function like Zoom for video conferencing or a VPN. However, I had an unpleasant thought about how AI could be used for employee surveillance.

There have been services that monitor how your mouse is moving during the day. Clever people figured out little jigglers to keep it in motion. It was a failed attempt at surveillance for the purpose of increasing productivity.

Important PSA: Every employee should know that there is no such thing as privacy on your work laptop.

Work rule: Never, ever log into your personal sites on your work laptop. Nothing on your laptop is private.

I can imagine an AI that monitors employees machines and summarizes everything for their manager.

  • How much they accomplished
  • What they worked on
  • What they said in Zoom calls
  • What they said in Slack DMs
  • If they ever mentioned you

This is very disconcerting. Employees complaining about their bosses and clients has been around for many thousands of years. See Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir from 4,000 years ago. I’m sure Ea-nāṣir’s employees had plenty to say about him in their tablet version of Slack.

Great Wikipedia article by the way.

I can fully see how this would be implemented technically. We already have AI Slack summarizes and Zoom AI companions. This would just be one step further with a desktop service.

It is obvious that most information workers are not 100% productive. However, trying to get people to be non-stop productive is a terrible idea. It would lead to burnout and frequent mistakes. You need time to think and to reset. You need time to walk and work out thorny issues.

As a society, we are worried that AI will take our jobs, but there are other things to be worried about. We see how China monitors everyone’s social and physical activity, but it may start much closer to your workplace. We worry about AI attacking us with biological weapons, but it might be corporate forces that start with eliminating privacy.

I don’t know of any company doing this now, but the thought made me very nervous for the immediate future. There are many people thinking about technology now, but I believe we are (as a civilization) entering uncharted territory. I am still hopeful that we have a happy ending, but only time will tell.

Comments

One response to “An Unpleasant AI Thought”

  1. Dan Lipka Avatar
    Dan Lipka

    I believe it will be way worse than that. The companies will not only look at your work, but also cross-reference it with your social media. They will sell this data to the government (or other companies), who will cross-reference it with your physical movements (if you’ve been to the airport, the government already “knows” your face), your driving (via your license plate and smart phone), who you contact, your health (medical records and smart watches), what you watch on TV, etc. Without surefire controls, the government will know everything. Just wait until a company/government starts giving away smart glasses with the caveat that it records and submits everything that you see and do. “Personal Data” will be too easy to gather and too powerful for both companies and the government to willingly ignore. We need explicit protections before it is too late

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