“Manna” by Marshall Brain of howstuffworks.com ?

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

An interesting read, thanks for this.

Whoa this is excellent!

From back when we thought silicon valley were the good guys working to prevent a dystopian future and deliver a better one.

RIP Marshall Brain. He was a great man. And quite befitting the peculiar name.

It really makes me think. Honestly the Manna system has only just since the LLM discovery been possible, whereas it seemed a bit farfetched to me 15 years ago when I first read it. It would be pretty easy to roll today’s “AI” into a product to replace fast food managers like in that story.

There is nothing AI about that demo though? It is just humans talking on the phone looking at an mvp dashboard of basic productivity metrics. In serious logistics/ manufacturing better stuff than this is already in place.

e.g this article from six years ago about Amazon’s practices then: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse...

It's not slavery. There's enough of that around without making stuff up

Many, many, sweatshop workers are slaves.

You're right. It's not slavery.

Slaves didn't have freedom to move jobs or to have agency in their lives. At the base level, let alone all the abuses they faced which varied in places and times throughout history.

But a lot of these workers don't have some things that even slaves had. Like room and board.

There's a very common and often discussed concept called wage slavery. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

Which is different from chattel slavery, of course. But it's still an extant theory that gets discussed widely. It would seem an AI company to be a labor panopticon would align with the critiques raised by the concept of wage slavery.

Its important to raise awareness of the forms of modern slavery [1] and while comparing employee-surveillance software to slavery may seem hyperbolic, we who build these tools are culpable to their impact on the world and what they might lead to next.

[1]: https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/

Another example of terms being appropriated like that would be how "piracy" now refers to copying information your aren't legally permitted to copy, as well as the older meaning of using violence to steal things at sea.

Another one is nemesis, which now refers to a long standing enemy, as well as the older meaning of a Greek goddess of vengeance.

Don't imply or wink and nudge. Say what you mean to say. Your example is either a non sequiter like mine, or it's implying something while avoiding saying the actual thing you are trying to convey.