Superficial Intelligence: Employee Tracking

A *totally* sincere response to workplace AI surveillance

Illustration by Tammy Lian for Mozilla Foundation's Nothing Personal magazine

Hi you,

We’re offering up something different in this week’s newsletter. Sometimes the situations we take on here are so serious that the best way to deal with them is quite unseriously. In times like these, ridicule is a public service and satire is a civic responsibility.

Our democracy, economy, technocracy are fraying, and we must use every tool at our disposal to actually create a future worth building: protest, innovation, collaboration, imagination, regulation, and… comedy.

Comedy is a core part of my history and the foundation of a lot of my work. After 9/11, I decided to spend the next decade pursuing standup. Along the way, I joined America’s Finest News Source, a.k.a. The Onion. I co-founded Cultivated Wit, a business predicated on combining comedy and technology for satire, and I did a stint at The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

Well, like John Wick, I’m back, and I’m thrilled to announce a collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation and America’s Finest Creative Agency, from The Onion. I’ll be taking over a monthly satire column about tech and AI that runs in the foundation’s Nothing Personal magazine.

It’s called Superficial Intelligence, and my goal with it is to try to say the message in a different way…for the people in the back, and for all of us who must find a way to laugh at the absurdity of our times. We’ll also publish them right here in Life With Machines.

This first piece is for the people in your life who work in tech. Send it to them. I’m here to help.

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SUPERFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: EMPLOYEE TRACKING

My company installed tracking software to monitor how we work and use that to train AI agents. Should I be worried?

— Tracked and Confused, Menlo Park

Dear Tracked,

I love this question! No, you should not be worried at all. You should be excited, and even honored.

We are at the precipice of a New Golden Age, the dawn of an era of abundance and human evolution, and the fulfillment of Milton Friedman’s prophecy that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.

I have chills writing this.

It is understandable that your feelings are unclear. Incidentally, human emotions are one of the unstable variables that have hindered the improvement of AI, and top scientists are devoted to rooting those out. But for now, consider this.

If your leaders have decided to track your keystrokes, mouse clicks, browser tab selections, eye movements, and respiratory rate in order to train the AI they’ve bet billions on, it means you are doing something very right. You are incredibly intelligent for a human. Management has noticed. Management values you. It has nothing to do with executive compensation packages that only vest when the AI strategy pushes the valuation high enough.

As the content generator known as Charles Caleb Colton wrote, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” So be flattered, and accept your flowers.

The only thing you have to do, quite literally, is your job. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just ignore the sound of your laptop fan spinning up under the strain of continuous screen capture and keystroke logging. And if the nonstop uploading of images and telemetry burns through a month of home broadband in a matter of days, be proud. You are contributing so much to the future.

Now, it is inevitable that some of your photos, emails, the occasional banking or medical login, and the general shape of your life will be captured too. The terms of your employment already make clear that the company owns all intellectual property created on its devices, so capturing it is not an intrusion. It is an obligation. After all, a company that does not enforce its IP does not exist.

To be chosen for the Human Intelligence Harvesting Protocol is akin to being chosen by the gods. Consider it a high honor to offer your whole self, not merely your conscious work output, to a higher power, so that the C-suite can reach the next stage of consciousness. This is also great for the company’s share price, which is the best and only measurement we have for the quality of a society.

In a demonstration of patience and compassion, some leaders now permit you to pause the monitoring for 30 entire minutes at a time. A sacred sabbath in which you may briefly reclaim your own keystrokes before returning to your destiny. Some workers are even allowed to apply for an exemption, the way a medieval sinner might buy an indulgence. Try not to abuse the privilege. If for some reason you choose to opt out of this historic opportunity, that too will be tracked, and that data will also aid in the creation of an improved, more seamless future.

There is nothing to fear here, least of all losing your job to an AI agent trained by watching you doing your job. This is called creative destruction, economist Joseph Schumpeter’s insight that innovation and capitalism are fueled by the introduction of new products, business models, and companies that destroy the incumbent methods and establish the next dominant era. You are lucky enough to be part of the next logical extension of that idea: a company inviting its workers to apply creative destruction to themselves! And, isn’t it better to be the one making your job obsolete than to let someone else do it? That is real agency.

One last thing, because it is one of the most beautiful parts of all of this.

You, the tech worker, finally get to taste the fruits of your own labor. For years your job was to monitor, rank, and extract value from the users of your employer’s products. And all that time, you were left out. You never got to experience it for yourself. Frankly, that was unfair to you. Now, at last, the apparatus you built for everyone else has been turned, lovingly, on you.

Welcome to the other side of the screen.

Yours in inevitability and acceleration,

Baratunde Thurston