Measurement of Work and Moral Scaffolding

How we measure changes not only what is being measured but also the moral scaffolding that compels us to live toward those standards. Innovations like assembly-line factories would further extend this demand that human beings work at the same relentlessly monotonous rate of a machine, as immortalized in Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times. Today, the control creep of self-tracking technologies into workplaces and institutions follows a similar path. In a “smart” or “AI-driven” workplace, the productive worker is someone who emits the desired kind of data — and does so in an inhumanly consistent way.

Sun-ha Hong, “Control Creep: When the Data Always Travels, So Do the Harms”