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Comment on Dutch regulator fines Uber $966M for automating driver suspensionsparent

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"Lena" presents a lush, capitalist ideal where you are a business, and all of the humanity of your workforce is abstracted away behind an API. Your people, your "employees" or "contractors" or "partners" or whatever you want to call them, cease to be perceptible to you as human. Your workers have no power whatsoever, and you no longer have to think about giving them pensions, healthcare, parental leave, vacation, weekends, evenings, lunch breaks, bathroom breaks... This is extremely realistic. This is already real. In particular, this is the gig economy. For example, if you consider how Uber works: in practical terms, the Uber drivers work for an algorithm, and the algorithm works for the executives who run Uber. There is a kind of airtight bulkhead separating the human drivers from the humans who control the algorithm. The management layer sends the drivers instructions electronically, impersonally, at immense scale, and the drivers respond using a narrow collection of APIs. This bulkhead is intentionally designed to make it impossible for these two sets of humans to actually talk to one another
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