Karen Hao

Yeah.

And so all of these workers that were interviewed for this New York Magazine story talk about how they actually no longer have an ability to be human because they are waiting at their laptop to be pinged on Slack for when a project is going to open up for data annotation because they've tried job hunting.

They literally can't find anything else.

This is the thing that's going to help them put food on the table for their kids.

And there was this one woman who said, like,

I have so much anxiety about when the project is going to come, when it's going to leave, that when the project came, it was right when my kid was coming off of school.

And I just started tasking furiously because I don't know when it's going to go, and I need to earn as much money as possible in this window of opportunity.

So then when my kid came home and tried to talk to me, I screamed at my child for distracting me.

And then she was like, I've become a monster?

And I'm not even allowed to go to the bathroom or take care of my kids, let alone myself, because this industry that is absorbing more and more of the workers that are being laid off is mechanizing my life, atomizing my work, devaluing my expertise, and then harvesting it

for the perpetuation of this machine that all of these AI executives are saying is then going to come for everyone else's jobs.

And so what you were saying...

about this class of workers, the business owners that get to become more human because there are all of these AI models now doing the tasks that they don't have to do anymore.

It is at the cost of the vast majority of people who are not business owners that are struggling to find work, getting absorbed into the work of then providing these technologies that the business owners can use.

And instead of becoming more human, they feel like their humanity has been squeezed and diminished, and they have no ability to have control, agency, and dignity in their lives anymore.

And that was, you know, I think you said that sentence in the passive voice, the transition would happen at a speed, but who is driving that speed?

It's the companies and their race with one another.

And so they are driving the transition to happen at a speed at which...

it would be really hard to take care of all of the people that would be bulldozed over by the advanced technology.

I mean, this is like the core themes of my work.