AI Won’t Steal Your Job, But It’ll Sure Make It Suck
We can spy a dismal pattern emerging in the future of work
We often worry that AI and automation will take our jobs — that software will do work so efficiently and cheaply that corporations will chuck their humans aside. That certainly can happen; bank tellers are in steep decline, to pick just one example.
But the more I’ve reported on the impact of tech on work, I’ve noticed another pattern that’s more complex, if just as unsettling.
In situations I’m seeing more often, AI and automation don’t necessarily destroy jobs. In fact, sometimes they create more work.
The problem is, these new jobs suck — often precisely because of how AI and automation affect them.
More jobs; worse jobs.
Food-delivery jobs: Working for “the phantom boss”
I thought about this while reading an excellent piece in The Verge called “Revolt of the NYC Delivery Workers”, which reports deeply on the grim work conditions in that industry. The delivery workers suffer from all manner of problems — for one, a surge in violent e-bike theft, while hapless police and city government mostly stand by.
But their daily plight comes from the food-delivery apps — DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub-Seamless. Those “gig” platforms have made delivery piecework truly miserable …
Workers get paid when they accept and complete a delivery, and a gamelike system of rewards and penalties keeps them moving: high scores for being on time, low scores and fewer orders for tardiness, and so on. Chavez and others call it the patrón fantasma, the phantom boss — always watching and quick to punish you for being late but nowhere to be found when you need $10 to fix your bike or when you get doored and have to go to the hospital.
Grimmest of all may be Relay, a company that manages dispatch. It has one big upside — it pays $12.50 an hour. But its software creates Darwinian competition amongst the delivery workers …
