Mark Newton

@pluralistic@mamot.fr The countercase, of course, is that there’s a corpus of work ready-made for AI replacement, but it isn’t happening. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is a huge industry in the global south, major source of national revenue for Vietnam, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, and all the other developing nations America sends its piecework to. The white-collar workers who service the contracts are trained on rigid procedures that tell them step-by-step how to complete their assigned tasks. Configuring a router for an AT&T customer, or answering a customer service call for Citibank, or entering all the fields from hand-filled application forms into the IT system, or making a sales call, or any number of other standardized, documented, regularized process work. The work is so well documented and rigidly executed that it’s tailor (or Taylor) made for automation by AI. And yet: That isn’t happening. At all. No sign of it. Not even a hint. The “gambler’s tell” that AI is successfully automating work would be the economic collapse of the BPO industry, because that’s the easiest low hanging fruit for it to pick first. If it can’t even do that, it probably can’t do anything else either. Everything else is harder, with more opportunity to fail in expensive ways. Unless and until it starts succeeding at the simplest, most repeatable, most auditable, most well documented work, nobody has to worry about whether it’s coming for their job.

Labor doesn’t want to stop doing #robodebt for old people. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-19/labor-stands-by-algorithm-aged-care-assessment-tool/107055252 This is a statement of their heartfelt values: with an absence of humanity, Mark Butler, with the support of the Labor Party Room and Cabinet, prefers robotically-evaluated “consistent outcomes” over tending to peoples’ basic needs. #4corners

@aqualung@eigenmagic.net But … what if you don’t really give a shit?