Adrienne Williams and Milagros Miceli are researchers at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute. Timnit Gebru is the institute's founder and executive director. She was previously co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google. The public's understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) is largely shaped by pop culture -- by blockbuster movies like "The Terminator" and their doomsday scenarios of machines going rogue and destroying humanity. This kind of AI narrative is also what grabs the attention of news outlets: a Google engineer claiming that its chatbot was sentient was among the most discussed AI-related news in recent months, even reaching Stephen Colbert's millions of viewers.

Amazon is well-known for its technological Taylorism: using digital sensors to monitor and control the activity of its workers in the name of efficiency. But after installing machine learning-powered surveillance cameras in its delivery vans earlier this year, the company is now telling employees: agree to be surveilled by AI or lose your job. As first reported by Vice, Amazon delivery drivers in the US now have to sign "biometric consent" forms to continue working for the retailing giant. Exactly what information is being collected seems to vary based on what surveillance equipment has been installed in any given van, but Amazon's privacy policy (embedded below) covers a wide range of data. The data that drivers must consent to be collected includes photographs used to verify their identity; vehicle location and movements (including "miles driven, speed, acceleration, braking, turns, following distance"); "potential traffic violations" (like speeding, failure to stop at stop signs, and undone seatbelts); and "potentially risky driver behavior, such as distracted driving or drowsy driving."

We were initially anxious about the introduction of robots into our workforce because of the potential disappearance of manual labor jobs. Robots would take over factories, we were told, they'd drive our cars and trucks, and they would do all of the cleaning that janitorial and domestic workers are currently hired to do. But it turns out auto-pilots drive cars about as well as my cat when he's drunk, and the way my friend's Roomba always gets lost under the kitchen table, spinning uselessly, unable to find his way out, suggests we'll still need people with brooms for a while now. Instead, the robots are here not to replace this lower tier of underpaid and undervalued work. They are here to smugly sit in the middle, monitoring and surveilling us, hiring and firing us.