Op-Ed: AI has reconfigured the gig economy and the rot is spreading

The whole basis of the workforce used to be skills. Those skills were already being devalued by a cheapskate and extremely neurotic, hostile workplace environment. The gig economy was worse. As you might expect, a lot of the gig work is being farmed out to “global workers”, at rock-bottom wages.

Now, the gig economy is eating the skills as well as AI takes over a vast range of tedious, repetitive tasks. It’s a whole new way of devaluing human beings. It’s spreading fast.

AI management systems

The rot is now infecting the mainstream in much the same way the gig economy created precedents for devaluing the wider workforce. The AI gig economy news on any given day is dripping with various tales of woe as AI, largely due to its cost and implied prestige rather than actual performance, takes precedence over good management. Any mediocre manager can hide behind the AI and simply follow reports.

AI management systems are slightly complex at first glance, but they’re getting entrenched in routine core management practices. Basic human management is also getting automated very rapidly, including hiring and firing.

This type of management is effectively an extrapolated spreadsheet dashboard, with policies, rules, and a feel-good approach to visual neatness. it’s like a signing up brochure from business college.

It’s almost entirely textbook stuff, based on a set of arbitrary criteria with or without customization. You get a nice audit trail built in, and of course endless reports. It’s very much a matter of opinion how much credibility this two-dimensional obfuscation has at high management levels.

Not everybody’s sold on AI in a management role by any means. Tales of AI hiring and firing generate some interesting information. Rehiring is pretty common.  The “regret” phenomenon is said to affect 55% of businesses that got caught up in the jobs apocalypse.

As predicted by just about everybody, loss of quality and skills equates to a net loss unless rectified. There is also a swathe of legal ramifications in the hiring and firing processes, as anyone who knows almost nothing about employment laws would know.

The inglorious AI gig economy

The AI gig economy is a self-sustaining thing. It’s largely about AI-related tasks, notably training AI, although it has other roles. It’s brutal, and nobody has yet had a good word to say about it publicly.

This feeds back directly into AI management as well as the gig economy. You could be forgiven, and be at least partly right, for thinking that AI in its management role is now imposing on humans the same standards imposed on it.

The familiar crocks of old-style management are all still there. Automated performance reviews may not be as obnoxious and often deeply personal as the human variety, but they’re effectively the same thing.

Any decent manager would go looking for qualitative information, not superficial informational confetti like KPIs. That’s apparently not happening in the gig economy.

The AI gig economy environment is truly nasty. The work is really grim. Data labelling for AI training is a case in point. This is actually worse than old data entry, including image annotation, text annotation, and audio processing. You even get to draw boxes around images.

The gig economy is described by Gemini in passing with no particular emphasis as: “Crowdsourcing: Distributing massive volumes of simple tasks to a global workforce via open platforms for rapid data processing.”

When does AI stop being hideous?

The irony, such as it is, is that humans are net cheaper and far more responsive and adaptable than systems that will be obsolete at equally great expense in a few years. The tonnage of negativity AI is generating far exceeds its information.

If digitization had been so instantly hostile and destructive, somebody would have refused to invent the wheel.

AI is the epitome of a short shelf-life product. The contradictions in AI are simply unavoidable:

AI slop is now the all-time nadir for content of any kind.

Sales resistance is extremely high, largely due to the abysmal quality issues, and AI can’t compete.

High-cost systems are being imposed on a world that didn’t really need them.

Dislocating the workforce is seen as a total failure, which it was always going to be.

It’s more of a failure because the so-called savings on wages have evaporated in the real costs and risks of AI systems issues.

“We saved $25 million on wages for a net outlay of $100 million” doesn’t cut it with anyone, notably shareholders, investors, or the markets. It actually devalues the assets. The outlays dwarf the returns in the short term, and the long term isn’t looking too well, either. Maybe they should add basic arithmetic to MBAs?

Efficiency and productivity are now more rhetorical excuses for unconvincing acrobatic accountancy than physical deliverables.  

The gig economy is glaringly reflecting the hubris of the AI sector. The wider economy is in very bad shape, and AI’s constant huge drains on active capital are making it worse.

This just isn’t working on any level. To hell with the sugary visions of billionaires fluttering through fields of AI-generated daisies. This is business.