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> When I reflect back on this meeting, it was a surreal experience. Everyone present discussed the idea of building a workplace panopticon with complete normalcy.
I get being uncomfortable working with Big Oil when you care about climate, but that kind of discussion spooks me way more. That goes way beyond climate and uncaptured externalities - that's pretty much a direct line on helping repress a people (in the service of ossifying existing power structures, ofc); potentially an attempt to utilize technology to help enforce a modern day kind of class slavery. Is that not the most obviously wrong new piece of information here? Isn't that that most notable component of this essay? Big Oil seeks to extract more Oil - that's to be expected, given their profit motivations, however unfortunate. You feel about that how you feel about that, and with respect to this essay, I don't think it's putting up much new information. But the surveillance goals of the management there? Those feel _new_ - like, if some engineer made the mistake of agreeing to assist creating those tools, that seems like it'd be _much_ more likely to goad people to anger. Me, at least, clearly.
> In particular, they wanted to implement computer vision algorithms that could detect suspicious activity and then identify the worker engaging in that activity.
Using ML to pick people out of a crowd for enforcement before they actually do anything seriously wrong... Literally the plot of a bunch of fictional dystopian thrillers, no? I find the concept that we'd actively seek to build such a thing quite disconcerting.