Being employed by an algorithm is a dehumanizing experience.

I don’t miss the job.

I miss the paycheque, of course. I wouldn’t be honest in saying otherwise.

I miss the opportunity to look behind the curtain of this black box of AI and glimpse at the digital cogs and wheels churning out of sight and otherwise out of mind. 

But the job? 

Those scheduled emails nudging passive aggressively towards to-the-second productivity gaps. 

The alerts that popped into my text messages reminding me that the queue was open and I hadn’t logged in yet. 

Those shiny happy alerts that appeared overnight as transparently generated by some human resources algorithm feigning faux team spirit among some unknowable number of faceless coworkers.

I don’t miss that.

Just a couple weeks ago famed futurist and seer of technological dystopias Cory Doctorow released a new book called The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI^[1], a book which is now on my (already purchased) shortlist of reading material for the summer. I suspect it covers much of the same ground I want to explore here. (When I do eventually read it I will cite it extensively!) 

At the heart of this book seems to lay the notion of people working for machines: digital bosses. Though, some or many of these experiences are like as not less literal than what I encountered as an annotator, I suspect that the universal greyness felt by those who have experienced the phenomenon is worth understanding better.