onfocus

Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts.

Like nutrition labels on food, we should require companies to provide ‘human labor’ numbers for their products. Centralized social media and generative AI also require a surprising amount of human labor. We should be aware of the human cost so we can make informed choices about which technologies to use.

Despite recurring fantasies about the end of work or the automation of everything, the central fact of our industrial civilisation is labour, and most of this work falls far outside the realm of innovation.

This 2016 article about innovation, maintenance, and our attention feels especially relevant in our 2024 AI hype bubble. I would love to see maintenance become a core value of our society because that would improve our daily lives so much more than innovation does.

Pitch work is basically when a director, writer, producer, or any combination of those get together with an artist and say, “We want to pitch to studios and we need imagery.” All of that has now been given to generative AI.

Fascinating interview with concept artist Karla Ortiz about the impact of generative AI on her industry.

All of the major tech companies conducting another wave of layoffs this year are sitting atop mountains of cash and are wildly profitable, so the job-shedding is far from a matter of necessity or survival.

Short term stock boost is more important than people. Thanks, job creators!

Full-time office workers are spending roughly $1,020 every month to report to the workplace, while hybrid workers spend an average of $408 per month on attendance.

But in return you get the life affirming joys of navigating traffic. (sarcasm)

In an analysis of various work scenarios, people’s behaviors and sources of emissions, researchers found that switching from working onsite to working from home full-time may reduce a person’s carbon footprint by more than 50 percent.

A potentially hidden benefit of large numbers of people working from home.

But really the baseline of web design is so low because there’s a lack of tenderness, care, and empathy. It’s because we don’t see the making of a website as a worthy profession. It’s because we hope to squeeze the last bit of juice from the orange by mulching people in between modals and pop ups and cookie banners.

Harsh but fair. I don’t think this will improve as people expect automation to handle web design in the near future. Web development is a human process.

“National Geographic will continue to publish a monthly magazine that is dedicated to exceptional multi-platform storytelling with cultural impact. Staffing changes will not change our ability to do this work, but rather give us more flexibility to tell different stories and meet our audiences where they are across our many platforms. Any insinuation that the recent changes will negatively impact the magazine, or the quality of our storytelling, is simply incorrect,” a National Geographic spokesperson told PetaPixel.

The staff reductions will continue until flexibility (the reason people still buy paper magazines) improves.

Most of the subreddits have pledged to go private — preventing outside access — for 48 hours, though some, like the 26 million-member community r/videos, have said they’ll remain private indefinitely.

Volunteer labor isn’t an infinite resource. Reddit needs to maintain that resource with an imminent IPO, but it sounds like the current CEO doesn’t think it’s necessary.

See also: this summary by Cyber Yuki (click Show More).

Coupled with the Writers Guild strike and the arguably reckless pace at which companies are willing to adopt a mostly unproven, experimental, and demonstrably harmful technology, the world seems to be falling headfirst into a labor struggle the likes of which it hasn’t seen in quite a while.

The answers here are to vote for labor-friendly politicians and unionize. Good evergreen advice but also frustratingly vague for a specific looming threat.