News & Commentary June 29, 2023 (military AI is being repurposed for worker surveillance)

[Omaha Steve]

https://onlabor.org/techwork-june-29-2023/

By Maddie Chang

Maddie Chang is a student at Harvard Law School.

In today’s Tech@Work, military AI is being repurposed for worker surveillance, new questions are raised about the impact of automated farming technology on worker safety, and in Brazil, an increase in phone theft hits gig workers especially hard.

As covered in WIRED, a number of tools originally developed for surveillance in military and national security contexts are also being used to monitor workers. For example, one such product first marketed itself as a tool to identify terrorist threats online by scraping data from chat rooms and online forums. It has since applied the same technology in a new arena: “supply chain risk management,” which means identifying the risk of labor strikes before they occur. As the WIRED article notes, it is not clear whether tools of this ilk can actually deliver on their promises; however, their expansion into the world of work and their mere presence may itself chill legally protected organizing activities.

FULL story at link above.