Jodi Kantor

as early as 2014, I could see that the workplace was undergoing a transformation.

It was being digitized.

The way I first saw this was I did a story about hourly workers.

They happened to work at Starbucks.

I wrote about one woman in

Like the kind of job where in a previous era they would have been like, okay, Debbie, you're on Tuesdays four to nine every week.

That was being wiped away.

And very sophisticated software was slicing and dicing people's schedules in a way that was brilliant for the business.

Like they could anticipate weather patterns.

They could anticipate sales patterns.

patterns.

They could move people in and out of a Starbucks store in a way that was amazing for the business.

But this meant that these hourly workers were only getting their schedules a day or two ahead of time and they were completely irregular.

And I began to explore the effect that this was having on their lives and it was tearing them apart.

The next year, a colleague and I did a story about Amazon's

management practices, not in the warehouses actually, in the corporate offices, but they were kind of managing by algorithm in a very different way.

And what I saw was that the employer-employee relationship was becoming mediated by

by technology, and a lot of the human elements were being cut out.

And so I don't want to jump too far ahead in time, but to me, everything that's happening with AI in the workplace now is

is like the manifestation of what I first started to see back then.