Factually! with Adam Conover - Prop 22 and Tech Companies that Write Their Own Laws with Meredith Whittaker

Episode Date: December 16, 2020

Distinguished research scientist at NYU’s AI Now Institute and former Google employee/organizer Meredith Whittaker joins Adam to break down Prop 22. They cover workers’ rights for tech companies like Uber and Doordash, why Uber and others spent 200 million dollars on Prop 22’s ad campaign, Meredith’s experience organizing at Google and pushing back at their foray into military tech, and the dangerous myths around artificial intelligence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. And let's talk about work in America. When the economy is booming, why do so many workers have trouble making ends meet? And why is so much of our work precarious? Why is work paying less benefits than it used to? Why are people not able to stay in jobs as long as they used to be able to? Well, one reason is that over the last century plus, the labor movement has managed to put in place worker protections. These are federally mandated. If you're an employee of a company, they need to provide you with health care. You have protection

from sexual harassment. You have protection from, you know, all sorts of other bad things, right? This took decades to put into place. But companies don't want to pay for those things. And so what they started doing is misclassifying workers. They would say, oh, no, no, no, you're not an employee. You're an independent contractor. You still got to be in here nine to five. You got to come in every day. But now you're a contractor. I've worked these jobs myself. They're common across all industries and they are growing and they are becoming turbocharged by the new breed of app-based employers like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, which have used this independent contractor move to undercut labor costs across the board and radically underpay workers. While considering

the fact that this kind of worker misclassification is not only unethical, but also illegal, something needs to be done about this. And in California, last year, a law was passed looking to fix this situation. It was called AB5, and it clamped down on this misclassification and guaranteed those benefits for many, many more workers, crucially, gig workers as well. Now, this law wasn't perfect. It had some flaws, some very public ones, and some amendments were made later to address those. But the law in general was a move in the right direction. It guaranteed many, many workers, including many gig workers, normal employee benefits like overtime, unemployment insurance, and discrimination and sexual harassment protection. But can you guess what happened next? Some companies didn't like this law because it meant that they would have to pay for all those things.

And it would make it a little bit harder for them to exploit their workers. So this year, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Postmates all got together. And they spent $200 million to put a proposition on the California ballot called Proposition 22 that exempted them from that law. And it worked. And it's bad. And let me tell you about it, because it's not just bad for workers in California. It's going to be bad for workers across the country. And it shows just how counterintuitively undemocratic the ballot proposition system really is. See, it would be one thing if the companies made an honest case to the public about what they wanted to do. Something like, you know, our business model is based on underpaying

our workers and not giving them benefits. And since this bill gives them those things, we want to take them away so we can keep making money. And we hope you vote for that. But for some reason, that's not what they said. Instead, the massive ad campaign they waged was incredibly deceptive. Instead, the massive ad campaign they waged was incredibly deceptive. First of all, it touted polling saying that drivers preferred to remain contractors, but they didn't tell you that that polling was done by a literal consultant for Uber who's paid by Uber referral fees. And then after that, they just plain lied. They said that this ballot proposition, which removed protections from workers,

actually gave them to workers. They said that it guaranteed drivers minimum wage, even though it quite literally does not guarantee that. In fact, a study by UC Berkeley found that Prop 22 will guarantee drivers only about five bucks an hour, far below California and the federal minimum wage. But even wilder, this proposition contained a secret clause that made it so that if Prop 22 passed, it could only be amended by a seven-eighths majority of the California legislature. This means that Prop 22 is essentially enshrining underpayment of gig workers in the California Constitution. It's basically irrevocable. And let me tell you, that part of the proposition was not mentioned in the advertising.

They didn't want people to know about that part. And as a result, the people of California did not know about that part. They literally did not know what they were voting for. The corporate ad campaign for Prop 22 made it almost impossible for voters to get accurate information because, again, they spent $200 million advertising it. They had all that Wall Street and tech investor money to pay to get their message out. And the folks trying to get the truth out only had $20 million to spend. They were massively, massively outspent. And the ads that Uber, Lyft and DoorDash ran were so happy and sunshiny. They were, they were all flowers and light. They borrowed the language of gender and racial inclusion movements. They used faux

wokeness to tell a false story about the shitty law that they wanted to get passed that would increase their profit margins while hurting workers. And they won. These massive companies spent $200 million to buy their way out of a law they didn't like. In my opinion, that's not an example of democracy. This is democracy being hijacked by massive corporations. And let me tell you something. It's not just California. They're coming for your job next. This was such a massive victory by these companies.

It guarantees that they will take the same approach in any other state that tries to protect its workers. In fact, they've said that's exactly what they're going to do. Lyft has literally described Proposition 22 as a blueprint that they're hoping to take national. And that's frightening because this would give them even more power. And tech companies are already some of the most powerful companies in the nation. Many are clearly huge monopolies which wage massive control over public policy and which have so infected our daily lives that we can't even effectively boycott them. I mean, try not to use Amazon when they've put so many other retailers out of business and when their technology runs half the internet anyway. Good luck. So how do we organize in the face of this massive corporate power? What do we do as people to try to take the power back from these incredibly

powerful corporations? Well, to talk about this today, we have the perfect guest. Her name is Meredith Whitaker. She's the co-founder and co-director of the AI Now Institute. She's a distinguished research scientist at NYU, and she is a former Google employee who made headlines when she began to organize white-collar workers there to try to stop some of Google's most hideous practices. I am so excited to talk to her. It's an honor to have her on the show. Please welcome Meredith Whitaker. Meredith, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me, Adam. It's great to be here. So I talked in the intro about Prop 22. I recently read a piece that you wrote with

Veena Dubal about Prop 22 and the future of labor organizing in tech. Just tell me your version of what this proposition is and why it's concerning. Yeah, I mean, there's a longer backstory we could get into, but... Let's get into it. Well, the part that's interesting here is that this proposition makes a huge carve out, essentially creating a third category of workers. So before you had employees and you had some contract workers or temps or, you know, people who were not considered employees and the category of contract worker and temps has been vastly expanded, you know, during the eighties and nineties and the use of contract workers and

other workers who don't have the full privileges and benefits and security of employees has been expanded. But now we have a third category. And this category is sort of like a flexible worker who has a couple of the benefits, perhaps, but not, you know, all of the benefits that workers for hundreds of years have fought to acquire and that labor law pertaining to employees actually covers. So you're talking about things like no unemployment insurance for many of the app-based workers. There's no wage and hour floor, so you're not guaranteed a wage, a certain wage for an hour of work. There is sort of this narrative of flexibility that goes with that, that is masking the fact that we're just creating a new category of precarity that actually looks much more like working conditions 100, 150 years ago than it does like a new kind of prosperous society in which we're enjoying the benefits of all of this great innovative technology. innovative technology. Yeah, it really strikes me that Uber and Lyft and DoorDash and the rest of them were able to make the case that the only difference between employees and contractors or,

you know, temp workers or, you know, whatever this new app-based category is, is schedule. That if you're an employee, the company dictates your schedule. And if you are not, they don't. And then, so there's a lot of people saying, oh, I want that. I don't want the schedule that if your employee the company dictates your schedule and if you are not they don't and then so there's a lot of people saying oh i want that i don't want the company dictate my schedule i like my own schedule what they left out is that you uh by creating that division you end up losing all of these rights that as you said workers fought for for a hundred years and we're not just it's not not just talking about health insurance. It's like basic protections.

Like it also covers like employees, I think have protections. Does it cover sexual harassment, things like that as well? Yeah. It's, I mean, you don't have the protections of an employee and your employer is not

responsible to you to, you know, help deal with issues of discrimination or abuse or harassment or all of these other things that would be considered workplace conditions. And what's happened here is these aren't really workers. These are whatever euphemism they're going to come up with, flexible partners. And all of the responsibility for these things is then divested onto the least powerful actor, which in this case is the worker or the driver, the delivery worker, whoever it is. And, you know, the company washes their hands of that

and is able to, you know, instead pocket those profits, right? These companies spent, I think it was $205 million on this legislative campaign in California, the most expensive in history. It was extraordinarily deceptive, like outright lying, saying things like we're guaranteeing workers a minimum wage using their assets. When it does not do that.

When it does not do that. Right. But, you know, who's to know the difference, right? People at the ballot in California, which is already really complicated because you have all of these, you know, different legislative proposals that you're kind of voting at the ballot. You know, a number of people reached out to me who are, you know, very much aligned with worker rights and were like, what should I vote on this? Because the information overload was, there was such a deluge from these companies of misinformation, of kind of fake research that was used to discredit independent research. And they were even, you know, kind of forcing drivers and, you know, delivery workers to kind of, you know, shill for Prop 22. So they, you know, delivery workers to kind of, you know, shill for Prop 22. So they, you know, DoorDash people had to carry like Yes on Prop 22 bags to deliver

the, you know, meals where they weren't getting tips, right? Like, like it's, you know, there's a real grim. Yeah, Uber, I believe, would show you drivers in your area and each one would have like a little Yes on 22 icon indicating that that driver supposedly supported prop 22 but my understanding was from the driver's point of view they were presented with a pop-up every single time they opened the app that said do you want to say yes or no until they finally hit yes so eventually they just treated it like any other pop-up on your phone where it says do you agree to this and you're like yeah fucking whatever i

need to use the app uh and so so they ended up it's like true ast says, do you agree to this? And you're like, yeah, fucking whatever. I need to use the app. And so, so they ended up, it's like true AstroTurfing to make it look like drivers are supporting this when most don't, or there's just supporting it because all they've heard about it is Uber says, if you don't vote yes on this, you know, we're going to fuck you up.

Like we're going to, things are going to be bad for you if you don't vote. And they say, okay, fine. Yeah, no, absolutely.

I mean, there's no better example of the coercive power of these employers than that. They can sort of, you know, like click, click, you know, for those sort of review buttons that come up for apps. It's like review it now or later. And there's no, no option, right? You know, it's very clear what's going on. And it's, you know, beyond the amount of money that went into this massive deluge of sort of misinformation and kind of advertising for this proposition.

There was also, you know, they were hiring really sleazy PR firms and just these sort of like, you know, the kinds of folks who were involved in like the Harvey Weinstein, you know, misinformation around victims. But they were hiring these firms to basically like smear and orchestrate targeted harassment campaigns against some of the fiercest critics. Really? Yeah. And I, you know, I can pass you some of the stories on that. It gets pretty dark, but this is people receiving death threats at their home, having their, you know, address published online, having kind of, you know, troll armies and like paid, you know, I don't know, bots or, you know, whatever

that, that ecology of that is kind of harass them on Twitter. But it's, you know, this was, um, this was all out and it, you know, $205 million is huge, but it's less than they would have paid in the first year if they were going to properly classify their drivers and their workers as employees. So the reason they spent $200 million is because that was actually cheaper than them having to pay into Social Security and unemployment insurance and all of the other things that they would have, all the other benefits that they would have had to give that workers,

again, have fought for for decades and that they were trying to create a loophole in the California Constitution so they don't have to do that anymore. Yeah. And they made it really hard to roll back. So a lot of people voted on this based on misinformation. But they included a provision in the in the law that seven eighths of the California legislator is required to vote in favor of any amendment. Which means it's irrevocable. You can't get seven-eighths of anybody in America to do anything, much less a state legislature. Yeah, in California, no less, which is large and heterogeneous and strange. Yeah. Well, so let's zoom out and talk a little bit about the point of this project

in connection with the rest of the way the tech industry works, because it occurs to me. So I've covered misclassification of workers on my show before, you know, even when I was working, you know, in my 20s and, you know, white collar web development or media companies, there's this big tradition of permalancing, right? Where basically my understanding of how it works is, again, workers and the labor movement have fought to create protections for employees for years, for a century,

but there's always been this other classification, independent contractor, which we need to have to some extent. Hey, when you hire a plumber, that's not an employee of yours. You're hiring them to do a single job. And, you know, maybe there are situations in which, you know, that makes sense for a business. But more and more companies have seen that as a loophole. Wait a second. We don't have to pay into Social Security. We don't have to pay into

unemployment insurance. We don't have to give these people benefits. We don't need to offer them the protections of, you know, that an employee would have. They don't need to have the right to unionize if we hire them as freelancers. And so I used to work alongside people who were classified as freelancers by the company, but were still required to go in eight hours a day, Monday through Friday. They were just freelancers, thus permalancers. Now, that's an illegal practice, but there's been rarely enforcement against it, right? Yeah. I mean, enforcement is a big issue here across the board. And when labor law violations are enforced, it's often kind of a pittance, especially to these big companies. with the AB5 law that passed in California in 2019 that clarified that, you know, gig workers and other app-based workers should be classified as employees in most cases

was that it then sort of, you know, failed on enforcement because of the massive amounts of pressure that was happening from these companies. Really? I didn't realize that. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's always, there's always this sort of like intersticing skirmishes. You know, but, you know, that was one of the real issues. And then Prop 22 this sort of intersticing skirmishes. But that was one of the real issues.

And then Prop 22 was sort of how do we instantiate a loophole in this law that means that we don't actually have to comply. The narrative I was going to tell is, and you tell me as someone who understands this better than me, but here's how it looks to me, is that you've got, you know, companies like this. I mean, I remember, you know, going to an audition at the MTV studios in like 2007 or something like that in New York City and crossing a picket line of permalancers who were on strike because they were like, we need to be real employees. So I was aware of this issue, right? This is something companies have done to try to get around labor law. But the more I look at it, the more it looks like companies like Uber and Lyft and DoorDash are saying, wait, hold on a second. We can build a whole business model on this.

Like we can make these we can just have an entire workforce of people who are classified this way. And as a result, when the California legislature passed a B-5, as you said, which was a law aimed to crack down on this misclassification. So you can't do this anymore. You can no longer misclassify people who are really employees as independent workers. They said, well, hold on a second. Our entire business model of this, you know, happy, shiny company that everybody in America loves is based on misclassifying workers on a gross level. If this passes, it's going to be existential threat to us.

And we need to now enshrine this loophole that we've been exploiting into the law. Does that sound accurate? Yeah, I mean, I think absolutely. And I would point to the work of my dear friend, who we've already mentioned, who I think kind of unpacks this really clearly, because not only what they were doing was sort of recognizing that there was a kind of workaround to treating their workers, you know, with dignity and classifying them appropriately. But they were also using the language of kind of technological hype to, you know, effectively put a smokescreen between what was really happening and the image they wanted to project. So these workers weren't sort of, you know, precarious workers with no, you know, wage and hour guarantee.

These workers were entrepreneurs, right? Yeah. This wasn't a, you know, this wasn't a, you know, kind of a company looking to use regulatory arbitrage and, you know, worker mistreatment to undercut the taxi industry funded by a bunch of VC money, which, you know, still keeps coming irrespective of the fact that they have made no profit, right?

These were tech companies. These were innovative companies. These were willing to take the risk, you know, and see where profit would land in the future, right? So, you know, I think they really use this language to kind of baffle and misdirect folks into what they were actually doing. And this has been a struggle that folks like New York Taxi Workers Alliance, Gig Workers Collective, and others have talked about the work they've had to put in to shift

that narrative, to be like, no, these aren't shiny tech companies. Like look at, you know, if you look below the surface, you see that it's all based on exploitation that, again, looks a lot like the kind of unprotected labor conditions that we had in the late 19th and early 20th century. Yeah. I mean, when you look at it from that point of view, it starts to look like, what have they actually innovated? Like they've created an app, which is, you know, I mean, it's not nothing to create an app, but a lot of companies make apps, you know, like I could learn to make an app and, you know, me and me and 10 friends could make the beginning of Uber and, you know, et cetera. Like it's a it's a GPS app. It relies on publicly funded GPS technology. It relies on other companies, you know, creating cell phone services and it's, you know, combining those things so that it's not nothing, but it's not like a genius innovation. You know, we're not in like, uh, uh, you know, Edison territory here.

So what is the real innovation? It's figuring out how to get people to agree to work without, uh, labor protections. Like, uh, that that's essentially what it is that they've created a new model that allows them to undercut employee benefits. Yes. I mean, I think I think that's about right. I mean, I think also what they did is, you know, it's very expensive to create the kind of app they have. Right. That has, you know, and and they did that. Right. But it is reliant on the fact that we all carry cell phones now. Right. We do that without without that infrastructure already in place. And in fact, there were kind of worker-owned or alternative apps that taxi

drivers and others were kind of using or recommending for Uber, right? I think, you know, I think part of their organization was packaging this as technical innovation or their innovation. And part of it was, you know, not that innovative at all. Frankly, it was just kind of a bait and switch, right? Where when drivers started, they would be making more, right? And then they cut the wages, right? Drivers would sign up for subprime loans financed by Uber and then have their wages sort of garnished into that loan. So they kind of lured people in to on the worker side with these great, you know, promises, and then created a market and then created a situation in which these people had invested, you know, their their

money, their savings, etc, they'd invested their livelihoods in this company, couldn't back out. And then they have a kind of black box algorithm that is arbitrarily cutting wages without any insight. So the concentration of power that this kind of, you know, data infrastructure gives Uber is something we need to pay attention to across the board when we look at the way that like surveillance and monitoring and kind of like automated management of workers is proliferating through a number of other sectors. And that's, you know, that's barely regulated.

But we saw in 2019 Uber drivers, there was like a day in Los Angeles where Uber drivers wages were just cut across the board by 30%. And this wasn't something that the company announced, right? It's something that these workers who are organizing are like crowdsourcing, like what the fuck happened? And like asking each other, having to put together this kind of like,

you know, organic ethnography that helps them understand their world, but have no access to this information. That if you think about like, you know, organic ethnography that helps them understand their world, but have no access to this information that if you think about like, you know, in a more just working environment, they'd have a union that was negotiating these things, right? They would have control over these systems. They would be, you know, talking about these nuances and making sure that they weren't, you know, deeply exploitative, which at this point they are. Yeah. Yeah. Deeply exploitative, which at this point they are.

Yeah. I mean, the fact that Uber is able to do that, that they can unilaterally cut wages across the board for everyone. And my memory of that was they were in at that point, like a price competition with Lyft, like during that month, like there was there was a, you know, a fight for market share. It's like, okay, we got to cut prices so we get more market share. That gives the lie to the idea that Uber drivers or Lyft drivers are independent contractors, that they're entrepreneurs because they fundamentally, their wages are determined by the company, which can change them at any time.

And their actions are determined by the company. Like they choose whether or not to log into the app, but once they're logged in, they have to go to a particular place in order to, you know, get rides. They have to make sure they're in a zone where they'll get the rides. And Uber encourages them to be on the app as much as possible. And crucially, this is a thing a lot of people don't realize. They're not paid for the time that they're not actually having somebody in the car.

And so I was talking to a labor organizer from from L.A. about this, and they pointed out when you go to an airport now and you get a lift, almost all airports have put in like a line that the Uber and Lyft drivers have to wait in. You know, they have to like they get into this long queue. And like often it's like you'll see like 20 or 30 cars in a parking garage waiting to pick people up, just like, you know, taxis used to. There's no now there's no one at the taxi line. Everyone's at the Uber and Lyft line because it's like a third of the price because they're undercutting them. But so they're sitting there waiting. None of those people are being paid for the time that they're sitting in this garage with idling cars, with fume being pumped in in the airport. You know, this is not time that they have

to themselves. They're not like able to pick up other work. They're not able to like care for their kids. They're not able to do anything else. They're just sitting in the car with a podcast on waiting for you to get in the car at which point they get paid. So when Uber and Lyft says, oh, we've, you know, prop 22 gives a minimum wage, it gives minimum wage for the time driving. But since, you know, a large percentage of their time is spent, not you get it. Yeah. Yeah. It's infuriating. And it's, you know, it's also like, it's beyond the wage that is controlled by this algorithm. It's the route, right? You know, if you, if you sit in that line at the airport for X number of hours, who knows? And then you get a fare that's like $3, right? You have to go back to that line, right? So it's, you know, how does Uber control

where you go? How does Uber control whether your account works or not? You know, how is that calibrated based on their wealth of data information that is not available to drivers? I think these are all questions we need to, you know, we need to, of course, take seriously when we examine the way these companies actually operate. Well, and let's talk about the barriers to organizing here, because even if Uber drivers are classified as employees, which would give them examine the way these companies actually operate. Well, and let's talk about the barriers to organizing here, because even if Uber drivers are classified as employees, which would give them a, you know, a legally mandated right to organize, it's still very hard for them to work together because there's no water cooler. There's no home base like, you know, a lot of taxi companies,

you know, they've they have got the place where you go check in, you get your cab out for the day. You can talk to other cabbies and say, Hey, let's have a union meeting tonight. Right. Um, they're all separate, but then also it strikes me that Uber and Lyft have done a very clever thing in how they have organized who is driving for them. Because I read a stat and I'm sorry, it's going to be fuzzy. Maybe you know the exact numbers. You can tell me. But a very large number of Uber drivers only drive a couple hours a week. Like 80% only drive every so often.

That's your average. Your white-collar dad is like, I want to pick up a couple bucks, and I'll drive a little bit on the weekends. There are a lot of people like that who exist. But most of the miles are being driven by people who are driving for Uber full time. Like 80 percent of the miles driven are by people who are doing this as their main job, which means that the which means that like the the number of Uber drivers who are actually driving. Most of them are people who are not doing it full-time and they're very easily tricked by Uber's marketing, you know, that says, oh yeah, I just, I just like send my own hours. I'm picking up a couple extra bucks. This isn't a real job. No one expects this to have real wages. I have a job. This is my side hustle. And a lot of people

have bought into that. They don't even realize they're probably losing money by, by driving because it's just kind of fun. They do it on a lark. They don't do it all the time. But if you call an Uber, the statistical likelihood is that you will be picked up by someone who is driving full time and is making less than minimum wage. And they've just organized their life that, like, hopefully they can live on that. They're driving an old beater car. They're, you know, barely seeing their kids. They're driving, you know, 100 hours a week,

et cetera. And that that I really saw that dynamic in Prop 22, because you had people who say, hey, I'm an Uber driver. I drive once a month and I think Prop 22 is great. But that is not the person who's being affected by this policy. That is not the that is not the real worker. That's someone who's like, you know, they're just dipping their toe in. They don't have a real sense of like the people who are really doing the driving. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. And what strikes me about those stats is that, you know, while you could do kind of a qualitative study, kind of sampling Uber driver populations in every large city across the U.S. to get some estimate of those stats, that's really only information

that Uber can have, right? Like, you know, how many actually are, what counts as driving, right? Like all of these things, is it a log into the app? Is it, you know, pick up a fare? Like all of those things I think really matter when we roll those stats out, as does the fact that these companies, you know, they hire people who are brilliant at finding the one contrarian guy and then elevating his voice as if it represents a general population. So, you know, I, again, I haven't seen those stats, but I'm, I'm skeptical. Like I, you know, as somebody who did like data measurement for a long time, I'm like, how did that, you know, how did we get those stats? And again, the fundamental problem is that's like

proprietary information that Uber owns and the rest of it is us kind of poking around the sides, recognizing there's a big problem and trying to kind of come up with our own counter narrative, which represents the reality of drivers, but can't, you know, doesn't have the advantage of all of the information that Uber keeps hidden. Yeah. And you're right. And that first stat about the number of drivers who only drive a couple hours a week, it's true. I believe I saw that from Uber. I believe I saw the second one, about 80% of miles being driven by people doing it full time.

I believe I saw that from the labor movements, you know, counter messaging. And, you know, that's why it's like, it's difficult for us as the public to get a sense of what's really going on, of what the labor force actually looks like. But it really strikes me, there is a fundamental asymmetry there

where, you know, like my brother-in- law, you know, drove for Uber for a little bit. And he was like, yeah, it was fun. I liked it was like a slot machine. I never knew where I would go next in Los Angeles. And I was having a great time. And he did it for three weeks. And then he was like, I was losing money on this. Like it wasn't even paying for my gas. And so I had fun, you know, but he now he came to that conclusion. Other people might not do the math like him and they might say, yeah, I'm an Uber driver. I drove a little bit. I had a good time anyway, back to my, you know, back to my computer programming job. Um, and you know, it distorts, uh, our sense of who is actually doing this work because it means that like

people who are Uber users, like tend to know an Uber driver who's like, yeah, I like Uber. What's the big deal when like the actual people who are doing the work are suffering, are, you know, working long hours for like, really, we can't emphasize enough how low the pay is. Yeah. And I think this, you know, that sort of slot machine style anxiety, right. It may be fun for a second if it's a hobby, but imagine that's dictating whether you're going to feed your family, right. Whether you can afford to take them to get like COVID tests under an inequitable healthcare system. You know, like that's, you know, again, I think that's a condition of work that sort of like, you know, algorithmically mediated anxiety and uncertainty that we need to look at in Uber as something that is, you know, really detrimental to the kind of health and well-being of these workers and extend beyond, you know, simply the gig economy. We see that in these sort of, you know, dynamics with click workers like Amazon Turk workers who never quite

know when they're going to get a good job or when the next job is going to come up. So there's sort of a, you know, like a dark pattern there that I think is, you know, adds to the stress and anxiety. And again, it's being instrumented by Uber based on whatever their objective function, whatever their metrics are in ways that are ultimately designed to like suck as much profit out of drivers as possible while giving them as little as possible, right? Like that's the, that's what you report to the board if you're a good CEO. Yeah. Well, let's, let's keep getting dark. I want to talk about how bad this loss for – well, the loss for us as a society, the victory of Prop 22 is.

Because – so it enshrines, again, into the California Constitution this second-class, third-class new tier of workers that Uber and Lyft and DoorDash. By the way, we haven't we have not yelled at DoorDash enough on this episode, but certainly, you know, meal delivery is as bad here. For these companies, this is a massive victory and they're already talking about, oh, we see this as a model that we can export to other states. And I wondered if you could talk about that a bit. Yes. I mean, there already, there was like a gleeful press release that Veena and I wrote about by Lyft the day after that was like, this is, you know, this is something we want to explore elsewhere. You're seeing them gearing up to do the same thing in New York.

They're certainly pressuring the Biden admin around sort of new, innovative labor standards. I mean, it's all going to come packaged again in sort of terms like flexible partner and like, you know, all of this hype that kind of relies on disavowing the reality of this work. But I think, you know, we're looking down a kind of future of labor pipeline in which, you know, many, most of us, all of us will likely fit into one of these classifications. The same way contract work has sort of slowly crept up and taken over so many kind of formerly, obviously full-time employee jobs. And that's, that's actually something I saw

in the tech industry. When I started at Google in 2006, there were very few contractors, right? They would do, you know, things like food service, and that's even arguable if that's kind of should be classified as contract. There was sort of contracting programs that would, you know, set people up either to be converted to full-time or, you know, not to be converted. It's kind of a hazing ritual, but you did not have these sort of, you know, again, perm attempt workforces. When I left Google in 2019, over half the workforce, so over 100,000 of their workers were contractors. And this is a trend you've seen, you know, across the US and looking at, you know, looking at work like the Fissured Workplace and other work that looks at the sort of,

you know, encroachment of temp workers on full-time work. I think we have a template for what, you know, what's going to be, you know, what's in store for us if we don't push back. Because, you know, this is, again, like, how do we make a classification which we owe less to workers and which they're responsible for more of their well-being, and we're responsible for less of it. And that's what we saw. And it's going to be wrapped in the language of sort of flexibility and technical innovation. But, you know, the people who are expert on this are the workers. And they've, you you know they've let us know loud and clear what the effects of this are yeah i mean if the the real innovation again of uber and lyft and these companies amazon has done it with delivery workers doordash has done it with food delivery workers is uh hey we have figured

out a way to undercut the rest of the labor force. We have an app that lets people show up randomly. And we have now, by exerting massive political pressure, created a new labor classification that gets you out of like what? But like for reduces your labor costs by 40 percent or however much it reduces them by some massive amount. Well, that's going to be a ticket, a green light for every other industry to do the same thing. Like, hey, it can. Oh, is there a way we could make an app that would let people do, you know, at our meat processing plant? Or, you know, I mean, you know, can we hire computer programmers this way? Can we hire graphic designers this way? Can we hire, like, there's so many jobs that are open to this sort of transition. And these companies are paving the way for them. Like, should people be worried about their own jobs here?

You know, I think absolutely. Right. I don't think this is imminent as in tomorrow. But, you know, it's it's you know, these companies have power. They are very well organized. They already have a template for sort of a corporate funded misinformation campaign that kind of won this legal battle, got this Prop 22 passed.

And they are explicitly telling us, right? They're not hiding the ball that they are now working on expanding this category. So like, imagine iHeartRadio sort of went to this model and you just logged into the app. So like, imagine I heart radio, um, sort of went to this model and you just logged into the app and saw like, do they want you to host this podcast as a flexible partner today? Right. Like maybe they don't, maybe there's like some other person. You are describing, like, if you look at the business models of places like Twitch, right. Which is a website I stream on, this is

the gig economy for content creation, right? It's like you show you set your own hours, you make donations, except, you know, the the app lets you know that if you don't spend at least eight hours a day on it, you're probably not going to make any money. You have to do it for free for months until they finally start paying you. And they get a massive amount of content that they pay a very small amount for and they pay you based on the algorithm even if you're lucky enough to be paid they pay you based on the algorithm what the algorithm says that you should earn and what their cut should be you have no power to dictate any terms unless you're one of the very very famous people but that's like the top zero zero one percent um and so they're yeah and they that's exactly the way it works and you know

tiktok is the same way youtube is the same way um that's the gig economy for content creation but and they've managed to do the same thing where they've weaponized that there's a lot of people who will do it for free for fun or do it for very cheaply for fun um which means that uh they get a huge amount of content for cheap or free and the people who are doing it full time have a much harder road to hoe than people, you know, professionals would before these services existed. So it's already happening in my industry and there's, you know, I'm really nothing I can do about it. And it's, it's harmful. Well, I mean, there are YouTube creators who are organizing.

There have been some interesting campaigns like Instagram influencers sort of thinking about organizing after sort of, you know, decisions around advertising came down from, you know, the Facebook, Instagram corporation. So, you know, it is interesting to see the new models of labor solidarity that are cropping up in relation to these, you know, the way that it's getting worse for everyone. And the, I think, you know, in response to a lot of the labor that's been done by these, you know, the gig worker organizers in particular, who sort of like shifted the narrative and been like, no, this is about exploitation, not tech, right? Like,

you know, if you have to pander to the Twitch algorithm to see how much they're going to pay you, and they have all of that information and whether or not you're going to be surfaced is based on sort of, you know, what their algorithm says about how much they should pay you when their incentive is to pay you as little as possible. You know, we're already on the back foot there. And I think, you know, I think the organizing that I'm really interested in here is kind of, you know, well, I mean, I'm interested in any organizing that sort of regains a foothold of worker power and dignity, of course. But I'm also interested in the organizing that sort of regains a foothold of worker power and dignity, of course. But I'm also interested in the organizing that's been targeting control of these algorithmic functions.

And you have, you know, Amazon warehouse workers who are saying, like, we want control over the automated productivity rate that Amazon sets for us arbitrarily that has resulted in, you know, hugely high injury rates and, you know, almost unbearable job conditions and COVID unsafe facilities where, you know, hugely high injury rates in a, you know, almost unbearable job conditions and COVID unsafe facilities where, you know, thousands of people have been tested positive by Amazon's own calculations. So we don't actually know how many, um, and, you know, and recognizing that across a number of jobs, you know, we're seeing, you know, we're seeing this type of technology deployed, like white collar workers under COVID are having kind of spyware installed in their computers. It's like eye tracking, right. You know, it's like key logging. It's, you know, generating some random productivity score that goes to your boss. You know,

I think we're seeing, you know, we're seeing work, we're seeing work across the board be further subjected to this type of automated control. And I think when I think about the sort of, you know, the narrative around the like AI and the future of work, I think that, you know, the robots aren't really taking our jobs, right? The robots are degrading our jobs and our ability to earn income. That's a really great way to put it. And that's, that's even more terrifying. Yeah. That's more terrifying than the Andrew Yang version of we're going to be replaced. No, no, version of we're going to be replaced. No, no, no, we're going to be controlled.

The robots will just be telling us what to do. But let's, I want to hear more about your thoughts on organizing and I want to hear about the organizing work you've done yourself. So we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with Meredith Whitaker. I don't know anything.

I don't know anything Okay, we're back with Meredith Whitaker. I want to hear about your own story organizing in the tech industry because this is a big part of who you are and what you do, and we have not even gotten into it yet. You alluded to earlier, you worked at Google, and you, I believe did some organizing there. Could you talk to me a little bit about that? Absolutely. Um, yeah, so I worked at Google 2006 through 2019. So my youth,

I, you know, I, I came in as someone who was not, you know, I was not looking for a tech job, they found my resume on monster, which was like old school LinkedIn. And so I was sort of, you know, really fresh into this environment that didn't hold that much interest for me, but they were paying well. And it seemed interesting. And that was, you know, kind of my my journey through Google was trying to figure out what was going on. Why was, you know, why were people so pompous? Why were, you know, what was the basis of these claims? How did computational technology work? Like, you know, why were they so rich?

A lot of like naive questions, but suffice it to say, I was there for a long time. I worked, you know, I ended up having a really interesting job. I founded their open research group, which was like collaborating across different institutions to work on like big problems in tech, like issues of privacy, security, you know, how do you set the benchmark for net neutrality, things like that that were really interesting and engaging. And through that, I ended up being kind of concerned about issues around artificial intelligence and its sort of efficacy and obscurity and the way it encodes, you know, bias and discrimination. And then the way it is often applied in ways that, you know, like we've been talking about with Uber, et cetera,

these systems are applied in ways that are, you know, further extracting, you know, money and power from those who don't have it and pooling it in the hands of an increasingly small number of people who do have it. So those, that's like sets the stage for my concerns. And part of, you know, part of what my job there was, and part of what made it, you know, feel cool was that I was, you know, I was given a big platform, right? I was like known for speaking candidly on ethics issues and bias issues in artificial intelligence. I was kind of a go-to in the company. Oftentimes like my public speaking didn't tow the Google party line, but I was, you know, I was getting promoted. I was like celebrated. It was, it felt really fun. Right. And I think, you know, there's a longer version of the story, but the shorter version is like, you know, I came to recognize that I was like, you know, I was allowed to have a voice,

but I had no power, right? So I was like in the room at the table, so they could say I was at the table, but I had no influence, right? I was sort of allowed to sort of play this performative role as a dissenter. So they could say, we, you know, we take the sensing voice voices into account. And, you know, it was around that time that I learned of a secretive contract between Google and the department of defense to build a machine vision, artificial intelligence recognition systems for the U S drone program. And so like, that's, there are a billion reasons. That's a terrible idea. And it was also like squarely in my wheelhouse, right? I'm like, okay, so I go around, I have like great arguments. I do my research, I deploy all of this.

And like, you know, of course it doesn't matter, right? Like their goal is increasing revenue and growth forever exponentially over time. And, you know, now military contracts are the thing that are going to get that. And this is incredibly dangerous for a number of reasons. So, you know, clearly we need power, not just voice. And that was sort of what, you know, that's when my interest in organizing went from like something that I thought was good because I have left politics to something I was like, okay, we need to do this because we don't have, you know, we don't have another muscle that we can flex in the face of these like terrifyingly bad decisions that are being made by the executive

on behalf, not only of like the workers, right. This is like a issue of urgent public concern for the world. Right. So that's, you know, and then, and then, you know, a lot of the work we were doing was like interconnecting those issues with some of the workplace issues. So, you know, and then, and then, you know, a lot of the work we were doing was like interconnecting those issues with some of the workplace issues. So, you know, why is it that, you know, the people who are the civilians that are killed in the drone program that has been deemed illegal by most reputable human rights organizations are, you know, poor and black and brown. people who aren't getting paid, aren't getting benefits, who are doing the contract work at Google are also, you know, generally like poor and browner and black. And like, can we look at the kind of structural issues across the board, the way these values map to each other and recognize like the type of power we need to build to actually, you know, accomplish real structural change and not just sort of, you know, reforms on the edges. And so how did you go about doing that? You said you, you know, became interested in organizing

for that reason. What does organizing look like at a place like Google? Well, I, you know, you talk to your friends. That's what organizing is at the, at the, at its most like fundamental level. So there were, you know, there were some other folks, of course, there's like a backstory here, right? But there were some other folks who I knew who had sort of raised this for me because I'm, you know, I'm a person known to care about ethics. So I was having people like kind of through the whisper network, send me signal messages that were like, Hey, do you know about this?

And I was like, you know, send me some docs, look at it. And then, you know, I, I helped write kind of a petition um the like maven letter as the the times called it um that was just like we shouldn't be doing this we shouldn't be in the business of war um and then I you know there were a number of people we were sort of organizing on different threads um how do we get this out there how do we get knowledge of this out there there were some other people doing that work as well um And then, you know, it's like organizing is literally organizing. You get into meetings and you think about like, okay, how do we reach out to other people? Okay. We need an argument around this. Let's like do the research. Let's

like come up with a one pager on it. Okay. We need, let's host our own town hall because we need to make sure that people can ask questions. Let's get somebody who's done like this particular type of machine learning to sort of write up how it works and why it doesn't in this case. But like, like, you know, it's, you know, you do your power maps and you just like sit in a lot of meetings and you listen to a lot of people. And it, you know, this kind of blew up. And it, you know, this kind of blew up also because like Google's identity, Google's identity was so like tied to this kind of, you know, saccharine do-gooder image. And a lot of people I think have like internalized that as part of their worker identity. And so, you know, this was personal for a lot of people.

And I think it, you know, it was kind of a rupture in tech, right? When like the mask came off a little bit, I ended up like debating the CEO of cloud and the head of infrastructure, like add an all company town hall. Like, you know, it kind of escalated from there because they were, you know, the people organizing weren't naive, right? Like were the people who know these systems and who kind of, you know, we've like, you know, learned how to write. There's kind of a lot of people who can sort

of compellingly speak to really urgent questions. And what became clear is they had no answers for any of them. Like the paucity of critical thought was like part of what was so chilling to me. I was like, what, you think about these issues? And it was like these sort of old, like, 2010s era internet arguments that just didn't, it was like so dissonant with the reality and the gravity we were dealing with. And I think that's where tech is right now. It's like stuck in a 2010 ideology with no capacity to deal with the complexity and the like, like, you know, darkness of what they've created. Yeah. I hear that so much that I've spoken on this show before about how, you know, I grew up with the internet. I, you know,

got my first broadband connection like 1999, you know, and that early internet ethos of openness and, you know, et cetera, really stuck with me, you know, that early google that don't be evil stuff yeah i mean i i ingested that culture despite never working in the industry um and yeah it's like not relevant anymore it's like a fantasy looking back on it but there are still people who like repeat it to you sometimes and it's like what the fuck are you talking about you're like what you like it was watching watching the CEOs testify at the antitrust hearing felt like that, right? Where they're like, we help small business partners.

And I'm like, what? Like, how can you answer that pointed question about monopoly power in your marketplace with like a line that I know who wrote that in 2007 right and like it also shows me that they don't have people around them who are like who really care about these issues really care about them are actually like willing to put in the kind of time to think through these issues and come up with like at the bare minimum credible messaging which is certainly not a substitute for like you know ethical behavior and decision making but like they're you know it's also clear that there are just aren't, you know, the people doing the critical thinking don't seem to be elevated to those roles in those companies right now. So what was the result of this campaign? Did you make headway on this issue?

Yeah. I mean, Google canceled the Maven contract. That was great. It doesn't, you know, the, the, you know, there was a, they put in these AI ethical principles, which were just like as weak as possible without being non-existent. I think, you know, a lot of the result that there was, it kind of catalyzed more organizing, right? Like once you're organized, you're organized. And what's nice about that is like, you then have that muscle to flex, right? When, you know, when there's another decision. So we also, you know, we organized around Dragonfly,

when there's another decision. So we also, you know, we organized around Dragonfly, which was Google's project in China to create a version of their search engine that would log people's phone numbers and be able to implement government mandated censorship whenever. And that is not good. It was especially not good

because we were in the middle of the fricking Trump administration. And like, this was, you know, this was again, creating a model on a global scale for something that is terrible in China. It's also terrible anywhere else. And it was like showing Google's willingness to capit was 20,000 people walking out to protest the culture of racism, misogyny, harassment. And it was that was catalyzed by news that Google paid Andy Rubin, who was a notorious sexual harasser, who also had a lot of power at the company for a long time, kind of the architect of Android. Yeah. company for a long time, kind of the architect of Android, $90 million as an exit package after,

you know, very credible claims of abuse had been sort of reviewed by the board. And that, you know, what that did, it wasn't just that, that was not the incident that the walkout was about, right? What that did was just like catalyze a number of stories. It was just like a, you know, a deluge of stories, a deluge of people sort of opening up about their own experiences in a company that, you know, doesn't value them. And it seems like there's a really powerful, again, corporate culture that, you know, the Google don't be evil stuff, I'm sure was drilled into everybody, that sort of sunshiny mentality. And it seems like it's really a case of the, that mentality that the employees still have being, hold on a second, it's not matching up with the company's actions

and we can hold them accountable. And the fact that, you know, the, the white collar employees at these tech firms like Google, like Apple are famously some of the most coddled and kind of powerful employees on the planet because they are so they're so highly skilled. There's a competition for their services. There's not many of them to go around the world. You know, that's why that's why these companies all care about H1B visas, HB1, I forget which so much because, you know, it's like that talent pool is really important to them. And so you're really workers with an enormous amount of leverage compared to many workers. Yeah. I mean, certainly the elite white collar

kind of engineering group workers of which I was certainly a part had, you know, had a lot more leverage, like, you know, likely more leverage than most workers in the world categorically. But the people we were organizing with oftentimes were contract workers or others who didn't have that leverage. And a lot of the organizing, you know, continued to focus on the need for protections and benefits and sort of, you know, more dignified conditions for that workforce. Again, you know, the contract workforce in tech is, has grown hugely over the years. It was not, it was negligible when I started, as I mentioned. And, you know, we're seeing kind of

the whittling away of these secure employment jobs with this sort of replacement with kind of precarious contractors. And I think, you know, I think what I am hopeful for would be a kind of a worker organizing that recognizes that, like, tech workers expand beyond the category of employment or even the category of, like, we all get a paycheck from Google, right? these vast supply chains, these huge networks that are irreducibly necessary to create this technology. You have people who do content moderation, which is, you know, it's basically the people who keep the news feeds running, who are low paid workers who work in traumatic environments, like, you know, looking at flagged hate speech or, you know, other vile material, which is, you know, proliferate. Horrible videos.

Which, you know, it's like real trauma, but there you know, proliferate on these platforms. Horrible videos. Which, you know, like real trauma, but there's no way to operate a Facebook without those workers. Like there's this promise that AI will do it. That's nonsense. It never will do it. That AI is always trained by workers who are sort of having to do that manual labor.

So I think, you know, when we tell a different story about tech, about who built it, it's not a singular genius in a garage, but it's actually reliant on this massive labor force of often like low paid, precarious workers. We also tell a different story about the solidarities that are possible between those workers and how we can actually like, you know, build a muscle strong enough to fight back that that corporate power. But that's that is hard to do to like find. For instance, I saw that a group of Facebook's content moderators recently did organize and put some demands together that Facebook treat them as employees and that they have like some basic standards because these are people they're saying we we work, you know, long hours every single day. We're expected to show up at a particular time. It's traumatic. We are, our work is essential to Facebook's business. We need to be employees and we need more protections, et cetera. That's one thing. And, and I could see, you know, hopefully there's people at Facebook

who have their back, right. Who has, sorry, hopefully there's people at Facebook mothership, you know, the, the white collar or the more white collar employees who have their back. But then, I mean, these companies are so diffuse, like when you're talking about, you know, how can an engineer at Apple have solidarity with, you know, people working for Foxconn, you know, in in China? Like that's you're really talking about something difficult there. And how do you build solidarity between an engineer at Uber and a driver, you know, who they probably see as a customer even more than or as an asset rather than a person as a couple lines of code? Yeah. I mean, I don't think there's one weird trick, but the hopeful part is, I think I would love it if there were. That would be a great banner. One weird trick to building solidarity in the tech industry click here and it's a picture of like a weird some weird guy's

face with a boil or something to make a million pop-ups you have to install an nvidia card to read um but I do even I do think that even the fact that we're talking this way is a massive change from a couple years ago and you did you know, you saw Uber workers, Uber sort of mothership workers quitting in protests around the Prop 22 stuff. You saw, you know, you've seen Uber engineers write kind of letters of solidarity for the driver's United strike in 2019. So there are, you know, it doesn't need to be anyone. And I think part of this is a political education that begins to surface these sort of hidden

narratives and create counter narratives that help us understand like who is actually a tech worker who's actually responsible. The other I think is, you know, you figure out ways to encounter those folks, right? Like, you know, there's a number of organizing meetings with, you know, different coalitions that I go to where a lot of it is just like meeting and beginning to trust people. But, you know, a small group of people can do a lot, right? It was like, you know, a handful of us working on the walkout with like thousands of other people who sort of joined in and contributed their labor. I think there's, you know, we do have models of worker internationals in the past.

And we certainly have a multinational economy that warrants that type of endeavor, right? Like it's never, you know, they will fight us, right? Like Amazon, we just had news that Amazon's investing in Pinkerton's and like, you know, spyware for worker organizing. They see it as a threat. Well, they see it as a threat because it is, right? Like it actually can work. So, you know, I think some of the organizing that's been done there that's really inspiring is the white collar warehouse solidarity that's happened, where the workers who started organizing around Amazon's climate impact began organizing around the climate of impact of the warehouses in solidarity with the workers, like hosting town halls with warehouse workers and white collar workers. Like, you know, this was a group of, you know, it's not, not a small number of

people, but it was, you know, these are, these are visions that then sort of like grew to fruition without requiring like everyone to, you know, buy in and have a perfect plan before we started. So I think, you know, I think the trick is like start and try and fail and learn. Yeah. It seems often, I mean, that's, that's all that we can do. You know, when I when I counterpose that against the massive power that these companies have and the political power that they have, you know, the like Uber is is in with the Biden administration. You know, Kamala Harris's family is, you know, is all up in Uber or Lyft. I forget which one worked on Pop 22. And, you know, is all up in Uber or Lyft, I forget which one, worked on COP22. And, you know, I have a good friend, a friend of mine from college used to work for Bill de Blasio and

Andrew Cuomo. He got into politics after college. He was a real idealist. You know what I mean? And then Uber hired him to run their communications, you know, gave him the golden handcuffs, paid him so much money that he couldn't say no to fight against his previous bosses, right? And to beat them into submission. Like that's been their actual, one of the smartest things that Uber and Lyft have done is more than even tech companies, they work on the politicians. They like, you know, work to erode labor protections really specifically. And they're doing it in the smartest way possible.

They're finding disillusioned, burnt out people who work in politics and they're paying them $500,000 a year. And they say, now go fuck your old boss for me. And they do it. And he's never not going to do it. You know what I mean? Like, like it's very, you know, and with Prop 22, yeah, you had people walking out, but you also had Uber and Lyft saying everyone's job is contingent on Prop 22 passing.

Every single person working for us is going, you know, if Prop 20, if you don't work hard to make Prop 22 pass, you're going to lose your job. And that's really hard to fight against. We can't do that with individual people taking a principled stand. I mean, my friend sold his principles long ago, but like, you know, there's other people who haven't. So I'm sorry. You were, you were leaving us in a really positive place. I just took it into a negative. Right. No, it's, I mean, but like, what that shows is they're organized, right. And they have power and that like, like, this isn't an accident that the world's just kind of like getting shittier, right? Like there's intention and organization and funding behind all of this. And I think we need to like,

take that vision a little bit and be like, okay, well, you know, we also need to be organized. We need to be thinking this way, like not, you know, let's corrupt a politician, but like, you know, who's our target and how do we get them to do what we want? And, you know, it's not that I think this is easy.

I just don't think there's another way to gain the type of democratic power we need, given all of the coercive apparatus that these companies have right now. Yeah. I mean, I have to believe it's all about organizing, you know, that is the, and it's all about creating that solidarity and changing those narratives on the grassroots. And when it works, it really does work. It's just, wow, what a long process it is, but that's what we have to do. Yeah. And and and we do the research and we you know and we support the people and you know we we continue to shape the narrative like you just

you know you try all the things and you keep going yeah uh so i want to talk a little bit about the work that you've done since you left google um you uh tell me about the work that you do uh with artificial intelligence how it's affecting our society. Yeah, please. Yes, absolutely. So while I was at Google, I co-founded the AI Now Institute at NYU. And this was, you know, ultimately in response to a recognition that myself and others were having, you know, folks who had this sort of privileged view into like labs where artificial intelligence or, you know, machine learning was being developed. And we're recognizing like, a pretty worrying disparity between the way these systems and these sort of capabilities were being

marketed and mythologized and the actual capacity of these systems. And there are like a number of reasons I was sort of sensitive to this at that time, you know, primarily because I'd done measurement for so long and had like a deep abiding skepticism of the capability of creating data that could like represent life meaningfully. And of course, AI is, you know, or the machine learning that we call AI at this point is all based on just sort of finding patterns in large amounts of data and then interpreting the world as if those patterns were sort of reality. Right. So all sorts of trouble you can get into there, but you know,

so it was clear that because this technology at this point in history was primarily being produced by private companies, it was shielded from, you know, from scrutiny of, you know, like the ability to validate these marketing claims by trade secrecy. And it was being sort of quietly pushed through our core social institutions, making really, you know, profound decisions that again, a common sense person would kind of assume there were democratic processes and checks and balances and oversight around when in fact, in a lot of cases, because it it was like tech and new it was circumventing those processes um anyway ai now came about because it was you know

there was an urgency to have a place to ask these fundamental questions and to produce sort of you know public facing kind of publicly informed research about the like immediate social implications of like what does it mean to install facial recognition in schools? You know, how do we begin to understand, you know, the core issues of kind of bias and discrimination baked into these systems? You know, how would you contest a determination about a system that like decides not to hire you when it's being used by a potential employer? And all of these questions that are sort of left aside in the narrative that AI is kind of magical and, you know, superhuman, capable of feats that, you know, us mortals could never, could never approach. Yeah, it strikes me that so much of our dialogue about AI is based on fantasy, almost.

AI is based on fantasy almost. It's like everybody read the, I think, Nick Bostrom book, right, about like super intelligence or whatever, about like, oh, is it going to take, which is, you know, this is a philosopher. I like philosophy. Thought experiments are fun, you know, but the Elon Musk version

of like, you know, is AI going to take over is about as useful a question as are we living in a simulation? You know, it's like great for philosophers. But when we're talking about our lives here on Earth and not again, not to degrade philosophy. We've talked about philosophy on the show many times, but we're talking about our lives here on Earth. Like the actual issues that that concern us about AI are not in the future.

They're like here and now they're not. Is it going to replace us? It's how is it being used by people today? And what effect is it having on our real lives? Because it already is. I mean, when you are looking at your newsfeed and you're like, why am I seeing these stories? Why are ads following me around? That is, let's say I already affecting your life. Yeah, absolutely. And it, you know, it affects our lives in ways we see and a lot of ways we don't see, because a lot of times these sort of decision-making systems are integrated in the backend of some processes being run by a company or institution we're dealing with, but they have no reason to disclose that to us, right? So it's sort of sorting us into different

categories of worthy and unworthy, whether it be, you know, in a store or at an educational institution or at our job that are, you know, ultimately not visible to us, make it harder for us to contest those determinations. Like, no, wait, like my productivity score at this job is like off because of X, Y, and Z. And, you know, like serve to sort of hide who is ultimately responsible for decisions that are shaping our lives. And I think, you know, I think the super intelligence narrative, like I have a lot of problems with it, but one, I mean, one, it is not true that like our brains are not computers and the infrastructure, like, you know, there's no, like, you're talking about servers that people need to like kick to restart, you know, there's no, like, you're talking about servers that people need to like kick to restart, you know, hundreds of thousands of workers carrying a pager when

these things like fail, like it's all, you know, there is a material basis for this stuff that is not just going to sort of detach into the ether and become superhuman. That's not how this stuff works. That pedantry aside, I think another real issue that I was having with this is it's like completely distracts from like who is benefiting from these systems, right? Like you're like the objective function, which is like the thing an AI system is ultimately designed to do is set by either the company to make them or the kind of elite firms and and institutions that like license them from these companies they like serve you know those those uh

those those forces like you know irrespective of whether we understand what else they do or not irrespective of whether they are more complex than systems in the past, irrespective of any of this, right? Like, if they stop making the person using them money, and that's what they're meant to do, they're going to stop using them, right? There are human actors behind this who are benefiting from these narratives and who use, you know, I don't know if it's like, I wouldn't, it's not a conspiracy, right? But I think narratives around the super intelligence, et cetera, are really convenient because they place AI outside of the political economy of the tech industry. They place it outside of the material reality of these systems and they place it outside of the present day where these systems are actually like already working in our lives.

And they make it into a mythology that none of us like, you know, lowly humans should even approach. Right. Like, you know, I think there's also a way in which that that makes it more difficult for people who don't have this elite training to kind of approach this issue critically and feel confident in their read. at the end of the day, it's just computers sitting around on dusty floors that, you know, are, are set up by people who program them, you know? And, you know, it, at the end of the day, it's just a tool that people are using the same as we use any other tool. And it really does distract. Like when we're talking about, again, something that I, is an area of concern for me, you know, social media algorithms, content algorithms are, you know, yeah, that's a supercomputer pointed at your brain that's trying to get you to click as much as possible. And that is there is a tech component to that. There is an artificial intelligence component. But like the rest of

the system is there's you, a human who has a fallible brain that, you know, like is being exploited that, you know, maybe we need you to understand more and we need, you know, that's like part of it. And the other part of it is, are the motherfuckers who set it up on the other end? Is the Facebook, TikTok, whatever it is, whose goal is to keep you hooked on this thing and who set up the objectives that you said, like, let's maximize viewer time spent on site and let's not maximize the quality of the information, the factual basis of the information or, you know, et cetera. Um, and focusing on that a lot, focusing just on the algorithm on just on the AI allows them to say, wait, what's our algorithm doing? Bad algorithm. Oh, we gotta, we gotta do some, we have to like put a think tank together to figure out these issues in AI. No, no, no. Maybe you can just reform your business practices, asshole. Like that's, that's what's going on here.

Stop trying to take advantage of people. Yeah, I, I, I agree. And I think, you know, I think what we also see is that this sort of, you know, there are a lot of reasons we stay on the site. The algorithm may contribute to that. Um, but the monopoly power of these companies and the paucity of viable alternatives also contributes to that. But the monopoly power of these companies and the paucity of viable alternatives also contributes to that. And oftentimes on these sites, we see these algorithms aren't actually that smart, right? It's not like, yeah,

I was confused forever because I only really watched like home improvement tutorials and like academic lectures on YouTube. And, but always the recommended YouTube videos are like, you know, Nazi junior talking all right. Like I, you know, I've never touched that stuff. Um, but like, and like why am I getting these recs and like, you know, the conclusion I came to is that like, Oh, I watch videos of people talking and this is a popular video of someone

talking because YouTube has a hate speech problem. Um, but like, you know, that's the level of like intelligence in big old square quotes. popular video of someone talking because YouTube has a hate speech problem. But like, you know, that's the level of like intelligence in big old square quotes that these systems are working at, right. They don't have any, anything approaching even close to like human discernment. Right. And I think we need to keep that in mind when we also think about the narratives of like hacking our brains, right. Like these systems are not capable in that way. And we give them, by giving them too much credit,

I think we also give the people who are spinning yarns around the super intelligence, et cetera, too much leeway about those narratives. I mean, at the end of the day, these are human systems, right? And so in the same way that I think I've realized that, you know, when a tech company says, oh, we're just a platform, people just say what they want. You know, that is that's the 2005 Internet mentality talking again. And it's false. You know, now I look at it as like, hey, you're throwing a party.

You threw the house party, man. If something gets broken in the house. Well, you were the one to set up the party. You put the music on. You know what I mean? broken in the house, well, you were the one to set up the party. You put the music on, you know what I mean? You, you put out beer. And so like we, you have a responsibility for what goes on, uh, on a, on a very basic level. Um, and, uh, so when they try to pass off responsibility in that way, Oh, that's just people. We're just like the phone company. No, you're not. You're, you're a little more specific than that. You're, you're, you're getting, you know, you are creating this environment. The same thing is true of the AI itself. It's like, don't pass it off onto those issues. It's humans at the end of

the day, you're the one refusing to take responsibility. And that's what we need to sort of take a laser focus on. And I'm really glad that you're doing that in the context of researching AI, because that's the piece that's often left out. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I think we just need different stories. And part of the research challenge here is to incorporate the voices who are sort of actually expert on those consequences, right? The people who are like,

who've lived experience can tell us, like, what is it like to be, you know, unable to get benefits because of these systems, to not get your child into a school because of these systems, to be sort of child into a school because of these systems, to be sort of assessed at the bar exam by an automated system that's called you a cheater when you weren't right. And to begin to like recognize that as core expertise,

the discourse on AI and not simply the capacity to sort of create the technical mechanism, but the knowledge of how that is working in the complex live realities where these things are deployed. So let me ask you this to end. In terms of all these issues, we talked a lot about how we could build solidarity between different workers in tech. What can we do as consumers? You know, like I try to stop using companies that I think are doing bad things.

But I've kind of reached a point where I can't do that anymore. You know, like one of the problems with Prop 22 is that I'm like, OK, well, should I stop taking Uber and Lyft and should I stop using like Grubhub restaurant delivery? Well, unfortunately, like the super shuttle that I used to take to the airport is now out of business because of Uber and Lyft competition. And last time I tried to call a restaurant to get them to do delivery the old-fashioned way they said i couldn't do that and i needed to go on seamless or they wouldn't be able to deliver food to me so i no longer have the option of not i can you know avoid using amazon that's a pain in the ass enough by itself but i can't actually because amazon's uh cloud computing is what powers net Netflix and all these other companies.

So, you know, like the sort of like weird patchwork individual boycott that we try to half-ass do doesn't is not even possible anymore. So we as consumers who are upset about this, but still have to interact with these companies, is there anything that we can do? And if so, what? Yeah, I mean, I think I think you're exactly right. And I do. You know, there are small things that we can do, like make sure to really tip your driver, you know, take an Uber, whatever. Hand them a $10 bill for the love of God. Yeah. Just, you know, be on the bench here. I think, but like, again, I think the sort of advice to like boycott individually or to sort of you know turn off notifications don't use Facebook like that's fine there are some people who can do that there are a lot of people who can't because those are the environments in which work or social life actually takes place

as you said because these platforms and these services have like displaced what used to be there and that these platforms and services don't just exist when we log in. Facebook has a shadow profile of people who haven't logged in based on kind of different connections they might have. We're tracked by facial recognition walking down the street. There's sort of sensors that are operating in different environments in the public space. We have data brokers who sort of take and sell phone data, credit card data. It's like there is no sort of trick where we can just sort of be a better human and solve this question there

and then have this sort of glow of self-righteousness. This is like, this is systemic, right? It's life in late monopoly techno-capitalism. And here we are. But I do think, you know, we've also seen it really inspiring kind of community organizing around this, like the wave of facial recognition bans that we've seen across the US, right? Like that was not inevitable. And that I think is a really hopeful portent for the kind of, you know, pushback that is possible as people begin to kind of have access to an understanding about how this tech really works, where it's actually operating in their lives, and begin to sort of figure out ways of pushing back against that of,

you know, demanding the ability to have a democratic say in whether these technologies are working. I think pushing for regulation, pushing for regulation at the, you know, international level, all of that is great. I think, you know, organized tech workers working with communities, that's great. Again, like I'm a try all things person. And I think we need all of these together. But, you know, the community pushback, things like the No Tech for ICE campaign, which was, you know, solidarity between tech workers and a lot of immigrants rights activists and researchers who were kind of leading the campaign. Like those types of things I think are like a template we

can look to for how we might, you know, generate the muscle to be able to contest these companies. But I think, you know, try all of it. They're big, they span, you know, into vast terrain, like dig where you stand and, you know, figure out how you push back from there. So it comes down to political organization, getting involved politically, finding that local organization, doing that work in your town, lending a hand to it. Like here in California, we have gig workers rising, uh, for example, and other organizations like that. Maybe there's one in your city or state, if you're listening or or getting involved in organizing in your own company or your own community or lending a hand to the organization of others. Absolutely. And if there isn't one, start one. Right. Like California, you have Drivers United. You have Gig Workers Collective.

You have other organizations as well. New York, you have New York Taxi Workers Alliance. There's Tech Workers Coalition branches across the U.S. And again, if you don't see one like it doesn't take that many people to start and start talking about it. And, you know, people like this is the thing about a politically activated population, which I think we are sort of becoming in my optimistic view, is that like once there is something to join, people will join, right? Once there's a compelling reason, they will act on it. But, you know, we have suffered under 20 years of kind of, you know, kind of tech dazzle and marketing that substituted for this type of like discerning and critical inquiry into the role of technology and power in our lives. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming on to talk to us about this, Meredith. This has been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for being here.

Yeah. It's been so great to chat with you, Adam. Thank you for covering these issues in such depth. And I just want to say hi to Crystal, who I work with and who really loves your show. Oh, that's awesome. Hi, Crystal. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Meredith Whitaker for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.

If you did, please leave us a rating and review wherever you subscribe. And hey, coming up soon, we are going to be doing some special Stitcher Premium only episodes where I answer your questions. So if you have a question for me to answer, this show is going to be great, by the way. It's going to be called Questions and Adam. I love that title. It's very stupid, which is why I love it. If you have a question you'd like me to answer with the help of a special comedian guest, send it to factually at adamconover.net. I want to thank our producers, Kimmy Lucas and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Andrew Carson, Andrew WK for our theme song.

I got to thank the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible gaming PC I recorded this episode on and that I use to stream on Twitch at twitch.tv slash Adam Conover. You can find me at Adam Conover wherever you get your social media, including now on TikTok. And until next week, we'll see you on Factually. Remember, please stay curious. that was a hate gun podcast