Comment by Blackthorn

Well I see no effort for it in the US. So, keep everyone there in your thoughts and prayers. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Right.

https://thecorporation.com/

Machines don't have feelings. But if a human is subjected to machine treatment there should be safe guards. Otherwise we all may as well live in goo filled tubes like in the matrix. At some point we have to decide what is fair treatment for human beings, similar to how we decide fair treatment for lab rats and lab puppies.

Would it benefit neural link to dog food their employees? What if there was a 5% chance of death. What if the employees signed in the dotted line anyway. Someone might say, sure that's fair play. Others might say as a society we shouldn't allow people to be treated as assets.

Is it reasonable to change someone's job description to having every action they take be subjected to company ownership? Depends on who you ask I guess.

I recall that being in my employment contract.

It's pretty common, Google it. Here is a website that will help your ai draft job offers with example clauses for it

https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/right-to-use-employees-nam...

Idk in the US but in France you are allowed to have personal data on your work computer.

Though you have to label it as personal (like creating a « Personal » folder or label and your employer can still access it in case of suspicion but he must do it in your physical presence and accompanied with a witness, generally a representative of the employees.

So you theoretically don’t have full privacy on this computer but you can’t be sanctioned for this usage.

Sure, but our employers weren't selling our intermediate contributions to third parties in the past.

Only because you live in a rigged economic system.

I mean, even if there’s no law to handle this it’s a pretty shitty thing to do, don’t you think?

It's true. I think the difference is that now it has slightly different implications as well as scale.

This goes back to 1995 when I was just finishing up grade twelve but it left quite the taste in my mouth. The web industry was just starting to kick off in 1995 and people were opening up web design firms. At the time, young people had part time jobs and while my attempts to pump gas had all ended in rejection, I managed to get a job doing ‘web design’ which at the time meant typing things like <tr> and <td> hundreds of times a page.

There were issues. One of the biggest was that it was 1994-1995, I lived in Regina and that city was not an early adopter. But the guy who ran the company had us doing all kinds of stuff for him.

Then he ran out of money. Since he couldn’t pay his staff he tried to sell his almost non existent client list to a competitor. I got a little lost on the details because they didn’t really make sense but apparently I was supposed to work for free for six months so he could sell his client list and then pay me.

I was 17 and really badly wanted to buy a Pentium processor before I started university so I was tempted but my parents had to explain that that was the single dumbest thing they had ever heard. I didn’t get a Pentium processor until 1997 because of that dude and I’m still a little bitter.

Moral is, buy the client list so the nerds can get to 90mhz. :)

What Meta does (and here I want to be clear that you can replace Meta with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Palantir...) is eventually public knowledge, profusely discussed even on HN. This means substantial amount of people have been aware, for decades.

And even if "just quit" is not an option - why not push for policy to regulate these corps? Why is it that after all this time, these same corps now also own at least 1 branch of the US government?

And when the EU/Australia/China.. tries to regulate punish those corps, suddenly everyone comes out on HN to explain protectionism, overreach, some -ism, and "actually we need to give them the benefit of the doubt" etc... why not support that momentum?

> It's very western of us to always be tracking the conseqentiality of our actions even when we're just the cog in a wheel

An awful lot of Eastern philosophy would disagree with you.

> It's kind of hard to blame individuals when they either are rightfully consumed by worrying about their own welfare or are for whatever reason not as seminally hyperaware or woke as we can be in the west.

If you care that your employer is being unethical (such as storing your keystrokes), that's being hyperaware, woke?

I know the definition of woke can stretch like taffy, but it now seems dislodged from its origins concerning race and gender and is now just a vague disparagement of any speaking up to injustice.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it

[dead]

while not the main reason, I definitely cited it as a reason for departure in my exit interview.

Don't expect any solidarity to come from such people, they literally sold out humanity for slightly higher salaries. They made their beds, least they can do is feel bad.

Why do you think they don't fully know what they are doing, they are smart folks. Now we all know how everybody needs to be the hero of their story, but self-lying only gets you so far in life, sub-consciousness will give you shit.

Don't put some mystery where simple greed is perfect enough explanation and there is little worry about others, some could use the word 'selfish' too. US society at large seems to me structured that way - there is no social net for the unlucky, healthcare also varies a lot based on disposable cash/job, good education is only for rich.

I thought mass quitting in solidarity would happen when programmers realize how their work is used to train AI and replace them. How many quit because of that? Doesn't seem like many.

Apparently, money wins over principles for 99% of us. How is this different and how are we better than Meta employees?

This shit's why the industry should have unionized when times were good.

It's not just for pay, it's for pushing back on inhumane horse crap.

Maybe in 2010 or 2015, but in 2026? Nobody is quitting their high paying job when the job market is this rough. A bubble has burst and there just are not the tech jobs out there that there used to be.

And employers know this, so they are enacting all kinds of draconian policies because they know employees know that they can't just leave the job and also keep their families fed.