Lately, I have been thinking again about the giant touchscreen machines in fast-food restaurants. It makes my head spin. Why does the corporate world squeeze manual workers so hard, but suddenly pretends to be blind when office workers face the exact same thing?
If you work as a minimum-wage cashier, management squeezes you completely. When the giant machine arrives, you are not fired immediately. You are told to stand next to the machine, smile politely, and teach customers how to tap the screen so they do not need you anymore. The limit of a manual worker's suffering is fixed. The company seems to say that because you are paid this month, you must work to train the robot that will steal your job. But funny enough, office workers who used to watch this while drinking iced coffee suddenly get amnesia when it is their turn to be replaced.
The reality of this AI trend brings an irony that makes too much sense, but tech fans will hate it. When talking about why people gladly train AI with their own data, many tech critics remind us with a hard truth: "we are not using artificial intelligence to improve human creativity; we are freely giving away our brain power to make ourselves useless." It means we are not getting more creative at all. We are actually giving away our skills for free so that we become useless and easily thrown away by companies.
The logic is actually very easy to understand if you use common sense. Our skills, creative instincts, and problem-solving logic that we spent years learning are our main assets to make a living. We need those skills to negotiate our salary, pay the bills, and survive. But the problem is, there is a blind spot. Every time we type into an AI, fix a wrong answer, or put a formula into the chat, we are just transferring our assets to a billionaire's server. We become free data entry workers. If we keep feeding the algorithm, our skills will slowly become empty data with no value for our own bargaining power.
No matter how great a "prompt engineer" claims to be, they are still just an employee who can be replaced anytime. They will never be the boss of the machine owned by a giant Silicon Valley company. So, what is the point of that twenty-dollar monthly AI subscription if we only use it to dig our own career graves? It is natural that this crazy automation trend cannot be left alone without criticism, because as observers note: "the widespread use of AI in the office is not about helping workers; it is fundamentally about removing skills to maximize corporate profits." So, using AI in the office actually damages worker power through a fake feeling of productivity, which is ultimately used to cut company costs.
If we think about it more broadly, this automation issue is not just about working faster during office hours. The damage to the social structure in the workplace gets worse because the global corporate economic view is broken and unfair from the start. We cannot just focus on working faster with AI while the CEOs and shareholders at the top are allowed to plan mass firings without stopping, using restructuring as an excuse.
Usually, when someone dares to talk about the dangers of AI like this in public, a crowd of people on the internet who love instant business motivation videos will show up. They will give a long lecture about the myth of technology adaptation. They will say that rejecting AI is like punishing people who want to move forward, while repeating the same boring LinkedIn quote: "AI will not replace humans, but a human who uses AI will replace you."
But if we break down this myth of adaptation, reality denies it directly through basic economic laws: "when a worker uses a tool to do the work of five people, the company does not reward the worker with five times the pay; it removes the other four jobs." So, the story about becoming a hero employee whose salary will skyrocket is often just pure nonsense. The reality is that your fast work only gives your boss a logical reason to fire four of your teammates next Friday.
Especially when talking about the broader context of the working world, efficiency from technology should be used to make the workload more human. It should not be handed over to greedy managers whose only job is to make a profit for their own pockets, while office workers in agencies, media, or startups can only bite their nails waiting to be fired. A decent job is a basic right, not just an expense that can be cut using automatic software to make business dynasties and quarterly financial reports look pretty.
This connects to the realization that makes me choose to really reduce my AI usage right now. Regarding this illusion of helpful technology, the reality becomes clearer through the conclusion that "beyond a certain point, AI stops being a tool for human help and becomes a tool to extract value and throw workers away." So, a tool originally meant to lighten the load is now actively turning humans into disposable items that can be thrown away anytime once the machine is smart enough to copy their daily routines.
All the arguments from these fans of instant productivity eventually just become nonsense kept alive by the system. If job security was purely measured by how good you are at teaching a machine, the McDonald's cashier who was best at tapping the touchscreen would be on the board of directors by now. The reality is that being super good at technology rarely makes anyone safe. Extreme efficiency usually comes from a system that is already unfair, where a few tech giants control the tools, or companies intentionally look for excuses to cut staff.
It just feels strange that every day we are told to accept and applaud a few tech elites whose wealth will never run out. Meanwhile, millions of office workers out there are actually proud to teach the machine that will kick them out just to finish their daily tasks. The executives up there will stay busy tweaking efficiency numbers so the statistics on paper look good for the annual report. They will keep counting every dollar saved from employee salaries, but pretend to be blind when they see workers' skills being sucked dry and office workers going crazy buying AI subscriptions to dig their own graves without anyone daring to set a limit.