In a factory in Bangalore, workers sit at sewing machines with cameras strapped to their heads. On the other side of the world, employees in a Californian office carry out their jobs under constant software surveillance that tracks every click, keystroke, and mouse movement. Both groups are part of new initiatives to train artificial intelligence systems to perform human jobs, with the hope that machines can one day replace them entirely.
Meta Employees Under Surveillance
The office workers are Meta employees, and not all of them are happy about it. Some have described the situation as "very dystopian," particularly during a period of heavy job losses at the Facebook and Instagram owner. Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly even developing an AI agent that could perform some of his CEO duties autonomously. Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, claims the initiative aims to make the company operate more efficiently, though the company's global reach could have far-reaching impacts.
"The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review, and help them improve," Bosworth told employees in a memo, adding that even the limited human role is designed to be phased out. The goal, he said, is for AI agents to "automatically see where we felt the need to intervene so they can be better next time."
This scenario echoes a dystopian prediction from US academic Warren Bennis in the 1990s: the factory of the future will have only two employees — "a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."
Global Job Exposure to AI
A report from the International Monetary Fund earlier this year found that nearly 40% of global jobs are already exposed to AI-driven change. The authors called on policymakers to ensure that economic gains from AI are broadly shared, not concentrated in corporate hands. This job displacement trend could worsen with the mass deployment of humanoid robots, which are versatile enough to perform roles once exclusively human, from operating sewing machines to working on construction sites.
A Trades Union Congress poll last year revealed that nearly two-thirds of young adults fear losing their jobs to AI. The union warned that AI could repeat the "disaster and long-running ramifications of deindustrialisation," leading Britain to "sleepwalk" into a labour market overrun by AI. Kate Bell, TUC assistant general secretary, stated: "Left unmanaged and in the wrong hands, the AI revolution could entrench rampant inequality as jobs are degraded or displaced, and shareholders get richer."
David Sherman, head of brand strategy at io.net, echoed this sentiment: "When a handful of corporations control AI infrastructure, they set the terms and everyone else absorbs the cost. They will ratchet your energy bills, train AI on your work to replace you, then act as though the job losses are an inevitability rather than a choice they made."
Unwitting Training by the Public
It’s not just workers training AI — billions of people have been teaching machines without realising it for years. Earlier this year, the creator of Pokémon Go partnered with a robot delivery firm to use a decade’s worth of crowd-sourced data from players. The database of over 30 billion images created a visual positioning system that can pinpoint a location to within a few centimetres without GPS, giving autonomous delivery robots unrivalled navigation in areas like inside buildings or park trails.
CAPTCHA systems have been training AI for even longer. Every time a web user identifies a traffic light or bicycle in a grid of images to prove they are human, they unwittingly help pilot Google’s Waymo robotaxis. Deciphering squiggly text aids digitisation of archived texts and newspapers, while each puzzle piece dragged across a screen provides key data for behavioural AI. By some estimates, Google’s CAPTCHA tests have provided over 800 million hours of unpaid labour in what is surely one of the greatest heists in tech history.
Legal and Ethical Concerns
Virginia Doellgast, a professor at Cornell University, claims such data harvesting could be illegal in some countries. "Workers are producing additional value for their employers. Are they being compensated for this, and are they given a choice to opt in or opt out? Probably not." Ruchi Gupta, executive director of the Future of India Foundation, described the camera-clad workers in Bangalore as demonstrating "the lopsided balance of power between capital and labour," particularly evident in developing countries like India. "The workers have no ability to refuse to wear the cameras which are training systems which will eventually replace workers themselves," she wrote.
A Different Era?
Humans have been working themselves out of jobs for millennia, from wheeled wagons to oxen ploughs. Historically, this freed humans to create new jobs, driving progress. But this time could be different. With the advent of artificial general intelligence — human-level AI — the tools replacing us might soon be better placed to invent new jobs and perform them more effectively than any human could.
