Riza and I recently tried to sign up to be Doordash drivers. Well, more accurately, I would drive and navigate while she did the actual pickup and delivery. I was actually looking forward to it a bit; for one thing, it would get us both out of the house and give us an adventure with a purpose (at least until the burnout set in anyway). Personally, I was looking forward to learning this city's side roads a little more, since my mental maps of this area are pretty obsolete, what with the broken '90s sedan and everything. The signup process was going along more or less fine until we hit a wall. "Scan your driver's license for identity verification, fraud protection, and systems training."
No. Hm-mm. Absolutely not.
"Identity verification," sure, I'll buy that. "Fraud protection," ehh, that sounds a bit sketchy. "Systems training," no, fuck all that. First of all, let's unpack "Fraud Protection", shall we? The last time I saw that phrase in a business setting, it was right before I retired as a voice-over artist. The agency I was applying to was going to make a generative AI clone of my voice under the clause of "fraud protection". The "fraud" they were trying to protect themselves from was having to pay their workers. So, I get understandably nauseous whenever I see that phrase in use elsewhere. What else is going to be classified as "fraud"? Being a bit late on a rent payment? Having a subscription to an unapproved streaming service? Being the wrong race?
Do we even NEED to unpack "Systems Training"? First, what systems do they mean? AI. They mean AI. Basically, this is the bit where they feed your driver's license photo into Flock and have it determine whether you look like a criminal. This is also the bit where, if Flock returns "YES" on the "Is this a criminal?" question, the phrenology algorithms get trained on your face to continue the systemic racism and carry on making AI more broken from the inside out. While I have no evidence to support this bit, I genuinely believe that data correlation takes place at some point in this process, based upon security camera footage, geolocation, selfies, and conversations overheard by Amazon Echo and whatever other always-on "home assistants" are in use near you. Depending on how invested Doordash leadership is in AI-powered identity verification, they might correlate your entire interest inventory with an assumed criminal record based on geolocation. I'm going to discount this as an improbable possibility, on the grounds that Riza and I really need this to work, and I don't want to get hung up on mental blocks of this kind.
In any case, it's easy to lose sight of the whole impact of AI on modern society when the only exposure you get to it is Mistral, ChatGPT, and Midjourney. Behind the scenes, managerial decisions are being made by analytical AI systems that have been trained on racist, classist, and sexist datasets. The use of AI to make even small decisions about who is "acceptable" is rotting away people's decision-making abilities and allowing systemic discrimination to take place on a scale that would even make white politicians in the Jim Crow South go, "excuse me, what the fuck?". While this wouldn't affect a Doordash job necessarily, there are even analytical AI systems that can project what your unborn child will look like, based upon chromosomal data. Remember the Human Genome Project from the turn of the millennium? Remember how they made that data open-source? Remember how OpenAI's models were trained on free and open-source databases first? These systems quite literally let you take an active role in eugenics by picking your baby's facial features, skin, eye, and hair colour, and mental abilities like it's Create-a-Sim Mode.
Basically, applying to work for Doordash really opened the cesspit and made me realise just how much people are relying on AI for. This is a broken system that gets more broken everytime the models are trained again. More to the point, the economies of the United States and United Kingdom are being supported almost entirely by the continued viability of AI. When the bubble pops, the entire corporate feudal state goes down with it.
I hope we hear back from our legit job applications soon so we don't have to deal with Doordash. Quite honestly, I don't ever want to work in the private sector; I'm looking at the state and city government jobs websites to see what file clerk positions they have open. That shit rules.