Reuters recently reported that Meta plans to install tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes for AI training. Meta says the data will not be used for performance evaluation and will include safeguards. Most revealingly, employees would help train these systems by doing their ordinary work.
One of the most degrading workplace experiences is being required to train the people who may replace you. This is familiar in outsourcing, restructuring, and redundancy processes: the employer asks workers to transfer knowledge, document routines, explain exceptions, and hand over the tacit understanding that makes a job possible.
Employers have always learned from how workers do their jobs. New workers learn by watching experienced colleagues; managers redesign work protocols from existing practice; automation has long depended on studying human tasks. AI changes the scale, visibility, and quality of that extraction. Replacement training can now be absorbed into keystrokes, screen activity, call transcripts, chat logs, emails, and the many traces workers produce while doing their jobs. The daily performance of the job can itself become the handover, without the need to sit with a successor.
The worker produces the output for which they are paid: code, edited text, customer interactions, medical notes, or administrative files. At the same time, that work generates material that helps an employer build systems capable of...
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