Being employed by an algorithm is only half the story.

My thirty-odd years as a employee of various businesses, organizations, and governments offered me a realistic, if often jaded, perspective of the employer-employee relationship: we trade our limited time here on this plane of existence for money, a resource we can then use to pay for food, shelter, goods, services, and experiences to manage and fill the rest of the time that we don’t need to trade for money and get to use as we see personally fit to use it.

It’s a terrible bargain, contrived by centuries of habit.

And for all those centuries the bargain has arguably shifted ever more in favour of the employers. Oh sure, unions and regulations and the five-day work week have intervened to give us the illusion of balancing the scale, but the trend, I would argue, has gone against us.

Enter the corporation. Many people work for a corporation, a beast who was popularly characterized as nothing short of a psychopath by Bakan in his 2004 book The Corporation^[1] often unchecked and driven to inhuman choices. We give these things legal status, power and the mandate to acquire wealth at all costs—and yet for all their faults they are merely collectives of human beings making decisions to hire, fire, and do all the fuzzy human things in between that account for the lifecycle of a waged or salaried employee.

I wonder, and perhaps had the displeasure of experiencing, what happens when we take that calculation a step further and remove the humanity. What happens when all that is left is a digital boss?

Working in AI, I sensed it as something even more disturbing than the cold calculations of a heartless board of directors putting profits first. It was almost a kind of personalized indifference.