Americans see AI not as a tool for progress, but as the ultimate weapon for a new corporate ethos where profits surge *because* of layoffs and offshoring. This breaks the historical assumption that company success benefits employees, making workers view AI as an existential threat.

Meta's plan to track employee computer usage is more than performance monitoring. It is a strategic data-gathering operation to train its AI models on real-world workflows, effectively using its current workforce to train their future automated replacements.

Meta's layoffs are a financial trade-off: human capital for AI infrastructure. The cruel irony is that remaining employees are now monitored to provide the training data for the AI that is not only supplanting their colleagues' jobs but also represents the company's future investment priority over its workforce.

Meta's mandate for employees to have their laptop activity tracked for AI training, followed by AI-driven layoffs, creates a new labor paradigm. Workers are compelled to provide the very data that makes their roles obsolete, turning the workforce into the raw material for their own automation.

Mark Zuckerberg defended monitoring employee activity by arguing that Meta's 'significantly higher' intelligence provides better training data for its AI than outside contractors could. This frames employees not as workers but as a high-quality data source, a logically consistent but dystopian justification for workplace surveillance.

AI's potential for rapid growth is creating a new moral calculus. Practices like tracking every employee keystroke for CRM automation, once controversial, are becoming standard. This trend suggests that as companies chase exponential gains, they will increasingly justify and normalize actions, from mass layoffs to invasive monitoring, that were previously considered unacceptable.

Meta is monitoring employee mouse movements and keystrokes to train AI agents. This practice mirrors 'Taylorism,' the historical method of measuring and optimizing factory workers' physical movements, with the modern parallel being knowledge workers training their own digital replacements.

Previously confined to factory floors, algorithmic monitoring like keystroke tracking is now applied to high-paid roles at companies like Meta. This signals a broad expansion of labor control, subjecting knowledge workers to the same dehumanizing surveillance long faced by hourly employees.

An unexpected side effect of replacing human managers with "faceless AI systems" is the rise of collective action. When gig workers and others are managed by impersonal algorithms, it fosters solidarity against a common, non-human adversary, leading them to form unions and activist groups to reclaim human agency.