AI’s productivity theater

hey welcome to the cory doctor podcast the last one for quite a while i think next week i'm going

to be at defcon and then my editor john's going to be away and then i'm going to be a burning man

and then after that i get eye surgery i'm not sure what it's going to be like podcasting after that

but it may be uh too much i'm not sure how well i'm going to be able to focus on my computer screen

for a couple of weeks so yeah this might be your last installment for a while and i do have a bunch

of stuff coming up so i will be in las vegas this coming week on august the 9th i'm going to mc the

eff charity poker tournament that's at noon at the horseshoe poker room and later that day at 5 p.m

i'm going to be on a panel called bricked and abandoned how to keep the iot from becoming an

internet of truth

and then the next day on august the 10th saturday at noon you can catch my big keynote dis and shit

a fire die how hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new good internet that

is hardened against our asshole bosses insatiable horniness for and shitification that's on track

one at noon at defcon and then afterwards i'm going to be doing a book signing in the book

signing area we have a great local bookseller coming out the following week august the 16th

madeline ashby's coming to town she's actually going to stay in our guest room

i'm going to be her interlocutor for an event at chevalier's books on august the 16th then i'll be

at burning man so you can catch me on august the 27th that is tuesday i'm going to be speaking at

palenque norte which is an event space at seven and e giving my dis and shitify or die talk and

then on the 28th of august you can catch me pretending to be a talking caterpillar at my

camp liminal labs 8 30 and c if you're coming to burning man you'll know that this is uh the alice

in wonderland themed year and at noon i'm going to be at burning man and i'm going to be at burning man

apparently there's a talking caterpillar suit that someone's bringing that i can wear

and i'm going to do a q a and then on september the 13th september 13th through 15th i will be

remote for albacon in albany new york and on the 24th of september i'm going to be at the boston

public library live and in person that's between my two eye surgeries and then from november 8th

to 10th i will be at tuscon and tucson arizona the regional science fiction convention where i'm

going to be their guest of honor so life comes to an end and i'm going to be at the boston public library

the thing we're doing this weekend is working with my now 16 year old daughter who is as they

say here in america a rising senior to figure out her college choices so that certainly happened

very quickly i remember podcasting about her birth i guess 16 years ago must be remains to

be seen whether she'll come home for christmas not this year but next year and that we can

continue our daddy daughter christmas podcast this year maybe our last one i don't know

she's going to be like a young adult it's freaky anyway that's what's going on in my personal life

this week i'm going to read to you one of my pluralistic essays it's called ai's productivity

theater and it's about the severe mismatch between bosses who buy ai to increase their

workers efficiency and the utter bafflement of the workers who are expected to use that ai somehow

when i took my kid to new zealand with me on a book tour i was delighted to learn that grocery

stores had special aisles where all the kids eye level candy had been removed to minimize nagging

what a great idea related countries around the world limit advertising to children for two reasons

first kids may not be stupid but they are inexperienced and that makes them gullible

and second kids don't get any good outcome from advertising they don't get any good outcome from

don't have any money of their own. So their path to getting stuff they see in ads is nagging their

parents, which creates a natural constituency to support limits on kids advertising, that being

the nagged parents. There's something especially annoying about ads targeted at getting credulous

people to coerce or torment other people on behalf of the advertiser. For example, AI companies spend

millions targeting your boss in an effort to convince them that you can be replaced with a

chatbot that absolutely, positively cannot do your job. Your boss has no idea what your job entails

and is not so secretly convinced that you're a feather-bedding parasite who only shows up for

work because you fear the breadline and not because A, your job is challenging or B, that it is

rewarding. That makes them prime marks for chatbot peddling AI pitchmen. Your boss would love to fire

you and replace you with a chatbot.

Chatbots don't unionize, they don't back-talk about stupid orders, and they don't experience any

inconvenient moral injury when ordered to enshitify the products.

Bosses are bizarro world Marxists. Like Marxists, your boss's worldview is organized around the

principle that every dollar you take home in wages is a dollar that isn't available for executive

bonuses, stock buybacks, or dividends. That's why your boss is insatiably horny for firing you and

replacing you with a chatbot.

Software is cheaper and it doesn't advocate for higher wages. All this makes your boss such an easy

mark for AI pitchmen, which explains the vast gap between the valuation of AI companies and the

utility of AI to the customers that buy those companies' products. As an investor, buying shares

in AI might represent a bet on the usefulness of AI, but for the most part, it's a bet on the

For many of those investors, backing an AI company is actually a bet on your boss's credulity and

contempt for you and your job. But boss's resemblance to toddlers doesn't end with their

credulity. A toddler's path to getting that eye-height candy bar goes through their exhausted

parents. Your boss's path to realizing productivity gains promised by an AI salesman runs through you.

A new research report from the

Upwork Research Institute offers a look into the bizarre situation unfolding in workplaces where

bosses have been conned into buying AI and now face the challenge of getting it to work as

advertised. The headline findings really tell the whole story. 96% of bosses expect that AI will

make their workers more productive, and 85% of companies are either requiring or strongly

encouraging workers to use AI. But...

49% of workers have no idea how AI is supposed to increase their productivity, and 77% of workers

say that using AI decreases their productivity. Working at an AI-equipped workplace is like being

the parent of a furious toddler who has bought a million sea monkey farms off the back page of a

comic book and is now destroying your life with demands that you figure out how to get the brine

shrimp he ordered from a notorious holocaust denier.

To wear little crowns like they do in the ad!

Bosses spend a lot of time thinking about your productivity. The productivity paradox shows a

rapid and persistent decline in American worker productivity starting in the 1970s and continuing

to this day. The paradox part refers to the growth of IT, which is sold as a productivity-increasing

miracle. There are many theories to explain this. But the paradox part refers to the growth of IT,

and it's not just about creating a particular company. One especially good theory comes from the

late David Graeber in his 2012 essay of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.

Graeber proposes that the growth of IT was part of a wider shift in research approaches.

Research was once dominated by weirdos like Jack Parsons and Oppenheimer,

who operated with relatively little red tape. The rise of IT coincides with the rise of

The managerialism, the McKinsey-wide drive to monitor, quantify, and, above all, discipline the workforce.

IT made it easier to generate these records, which also made it normal to expect these records.

Before long, every employee, including the creatives whose ideas were credited with the productivity gains of the American century until the 1970s,

was spending a huge amount of time, sometimes the majority of their working days,

filling in forms, documenting their work, and generally producing a legible account of their day's work.

All this data gave rise to a ballooning class of managers who colonized every kind of institution,

not just corporations but also universities and government agencies,

which were structured to resemble corporations, down to referring to voters or students as customers.

Even if you think all that record-keeping might be useful,

there's no denying that the more time you spend documenting your work, the less time you have to do your work.

The solution to this was inevitably more IT, sold as a way to make record-keeping easier.

But adding IT to a bureaucracy is like adding lanes to a highway.

The easier it is to demand fine-grained record-keeping, the more record-keeping,

will be demanded of you.

But that's not all IT did for the workplace.

There are a couple of ways in which IT absolutely increased the profitability of the companies that invested in it.

First, it allowed corporations to outsource production to low-wage countries in the global south,

usually places with worse labor protection, weaker environmental laws, and easily bribed regulators.

It's really hard to produce things independently.

It's hard to build manufacturing factories thousands of miles away, or to oversee remote workers in another country.

But IT makes it possible to annihilate the distances, the time zone gaps, and the language barriers.

Corporations that figured out how to use IT to fire workers at home,

and exploit workers and despoil the environment in distant lands, thrived.

Executives who oversaw those projects rose through the ranks.

For example, Tim Cook became the CEO of Apple,

thanks to his successes in moving production out of the USA and into China.

Outsourcing provided a sugar high that compensated for declining productivity for a while.

But eventually, all the gains to be had from outsourcing were realized,

and companies needed a new source of cheap gains.

That's where Bossware came in, the automation of workforce monitoring and discipline.

Bossware made it possible to monitor workers at the finest grades,

measuring everything from keystrokes to eyeball movements.

What's more, the declining power of the American worker,

a nice bonus of the project to fire a huge number of workers and shift their jobs overseas,

which made the remainder terrified of losing their jobs and thus willing to eat a rasher of shit and ask for seconds,

meant that Bossware could be used to tie wages to those metrics.

It's not just gig workers who don't score consistent 5-star ratings from app users whose pay gets docked.

It's also because of the fact that Bossware is a place where workers can work at a minimum wage,

and it's not just about the cost of the job they're working with,

but it's also about the cost of the job they're working with.

It's also about the cost of the job they're working with.

creative workers whose YouTube and TikTok wages are cut for violating rules that they aren't

allowed to know, because that might help them break the rules without being detected and punished.

Bossware dominates workplaces, from public schools to hospitals, restaurants to call centers,

and extends to your home and car if you're working from home, aka living at work, or driving for Uber

or Amazon. In providing a pretense for stealing wages, IT can increase profits, even as it reduces

productivity. One way to think about how this works is through the automation theory metaphor

of a centaur and a reverse centaur. In automation circles, a centaur is someone who is assisted by

an automation tool. For example, when your boss uses AI to monitor your eyeballs in order to find

excuses to steal your money, it's a centaur. When your boss uses AI to monitor your eyeballs in

order to find excuses to steal your wages, they are a centaur. They are a human head atop a machine

body that does all the hard work, far in excess of any human's capacity. A reverse centaur is a

worker who acts as an assistant to an automation system. The worker who is ridden by an AI that

monitors their eyeballs, their bathroom breaks, and their keystrokes is a reverse centaur,

being used, and eventually used up, by a machine to perform

tasks that are not supposed to be done by an AI.

The machine can't perform unassisted. But there's only so much work that you can squeeze out of a

human in this fashion before they are ruined for the job. Amazon's internal research reveals that

the company has calculated that it ruins workers so quickly that it is in danger of using up every

able-bodied worker in America. Which explains the other major findings from the Upwork study,

namely, 81% of bosses have increased the

demands that they make on their workers over the past year, and 71% of workers are

burned out. Boss's answer to AI making workers feel burned out is the same as IT-driven form

filling makes workers unproductive. Just do more of the same, but go harder. Cisco has a new product

that tries to detect when workers are about to snap after absorbing abuse from furious customers,

and then it gives them a,

zen moment in which they are shown a, quote, soothing photo of their family.

This is just the latest in a series of increasingly sweaty and cruel, quote,

workplace wellness technologies that spy on workers and try to help them, quote,

manage their stress, all of which have the totally predictable effect of increasing workplace stress.

The only person who wouldn't predict that being closely monitored by an AI that snitches on you

to your boss would increase your stress, and the only person who wouldn't predict that being

is your boss. Unfortunately for you, AI pitchmen know this too, and they're more than happy to sell

your boss the reverse centaur automation tool that makes you want to die, and then sell your

boss another automation tool that's supposed to restore your will to live with AI. The productivity

paradox is being resolved before our eyes. American per-worker productivity fell because,

it was more profitable to ship American jobs to regulatory free-fire zones and exploit the

resulting precarity to abuse the workers left at home. Workers who resented this arrangement were

condemned for having a shitty, quote, work ethic, even as the number of hours worked by the average

U.S. worker rose by 13% between 1976 and 2016. AI is just a successor gimmick to the terminal end

of 40 years of increasing profits, and it's not just a gimmick. It's a gimmick to the terminal end

by taking them out of workers' hides rather than improving efficiency. That arrangement didn't come

out of nowhere. It was a direct result of a Reagan-era theory of corporate power called

consumer welfare. Under the consumer welfare approach to antitrust, monopolies were encouraged,

provided that they used their market power to lower wages and screw suppliers while they lowered

costs to consumers. Consumer welfare supposed that we could somehow separate our identity

as workers from our identities as shoppers, that our stagnating wages and worsening conditions

ceased mattering to us when we clocked out at 5 p.m. or, you know, 9 p.m. and bought a 99-cent

meal deal at McDonald's whose low, low price was only possible because it was cooked by someone

sleeping in their car and collecting food stamps. But we're reaching the end of the road for

consumer welfare. Sure, your toddler boss can be tricked into buying AI and,

firing half your co-workers and demanding that the remainder use AI to do their jobs.

But if AI can't do their jobs, it can't. No amount of demanding that you figure out how to make the

sea monkeys act like they did in the comic book ad is going to make that work. As screwing workers

and suppliers produces fewer and fewer gains, companies are increasingly turning on their

customers. It's not just that you're getting worse service from chatbots or the humans who

are reverse-centered into their workflow.

You're also paying more for that, as algorithmic surveillance pricing uses automation to gouge you

on prices in real-time. This, in the memorable phrase of David Dyen and Lindsay Owens,

is the age of recoupment, in which companies end their practice of splitting the gains from

suppressing labor with their customers. It's a bet that the tolerance for monopolies made

these companies too big to fail, and that means they're too big to jail, so they can cheat their

customers?

AI may be a bet that your boss can be suckered into buying a chatbot that can't do your job,

but investors are souring on that bet. Goldman Sachs, who once trumpeted AI as a

multi-trillion-dollar sector with unlimited growth, is now publishing reports describing

how companies who buy AI can't figure out what to do with it. Fine, investment banks are supposed

to be a little conservative, but VCs? They're the ones who buy AI. They're the ones who buy AI.

with all the appetite for risk, right? Well, maybe so, but Sequoia Capital, a top-tier Silicon Valley

VC, is also publicly questioning whether anyone will make AI investments pay off.

I can't tell you how great it was to take my kid down a grocery checkout aisle from which

all the eye-level candy had been removed. Alas, I can't figure out how we keep the nation's

executive toddlers from being dazzled by shiny,

AI pitches that leave us stuck with the consequences of their impulse purchases.

All right, then. I will talk to you probably after my eye surgery in September. I hope you

enjoy the rest of your summer. I hope I'll see you at DEF CON or at Chevalier's Books with

Madeline Ashby or at Burning Man or even in Boston at the Boston Public Library.

And in the meantime, I hope you're safe. I hope you're having a good time with whatever

you're doing. I'll see you next time. Bye.

kids are in your life as they grow up and learn how to drive and start thinking about going off

to college and stop making you worry about whether there's eye-height candy in the aisle

when you go to the grocery store with them because they're now too big to go to the

grocery store with you. All right, I'll talk to you later.

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