In Taiwan’s AI-fueled chip boom, brokers control everything from paychecks to dorm beds, leaving workers feeling trapped and exploited.

Startups are deploying employee tracking tools in low-regulation markets with help from Silicon Valley venture capital.

Technologies that promise to track, manage, and supervise workers, increasingly using artificial intelligence, are getting entrenched in the developing world, according to a new report by Coworker.org, a labor rights nonprofit based in New York.

Audits of more than 150 startups and regional companies based in Kenya, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and India showed workplace surveillance is expanding in scale and sophistication, the researchers said.

Amazon.com Inc. equipped some delivery vans in Europe with defibrillators to see if drivers crisscrossing residential areas could speed up aid to heart-attack victims.

So dystopian. Traumatising drivers even more with the added responsibility of responding to heart attacks; a future where Amazon Prime members get priority response from those drivers if they ever get a heart attack, further locking people in; or more public health functions being relegated to Amazon and its ilk...

Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43673921

Transcript of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK0md9tQ1KY

It’s a way to make certain kinds of automation sound sophisticated, powerful, or magical and as such it’s a way to dodge accountability by making the machines sound like autonomous thinking entities rather than tools that are created and used by people and companies.

With 7 key questions to ask of an automation technology.

Summarising several "scientific" studies where:

[they] reduce a human task into an oversimplified game that, at its core, involves producing some plausible-looking text, only to conclude that LLMs can, in fact, generate some plausible text. They have committed one of science's cardinal sins: They designed an experiment specifically to validate their preexisting belief.

The pandemic showed us that undermining the public's trust in science can cost human lives, but the harm here goes further. These so-called studies are purposefully, almost explicitly designed to reach the result that workers are dispensable.