One of the things that, that you can do with AI is surveillance pricing
and algorithmic wage discrimination.
So surveillance pricing.
Your rabbi on this is a woman called Lindsay Owens.
Has got a book coming out called, uh, gouged.
She's the best. She's amazing.
And then algorithm wage. Wage discrimination is.
Vena Dubois, a lawyer and a scholar,
has written about this, and they're both the same thing.
It's, it's a,
it's when you use an algorithm to segment an audience
based on behavioral surveillance data.
Right, I,
I've seen what you do.
I've followed you around and your use of a service.
And then you start running experiments on the segments to see what
the highest price they'll accept or the lowest wage they'll accept.
So on the wage side, this started with Uber,
where drivers who accepted low ball offers.
And remember, when you're an Uber driver,
you have 20 seconds to decide whether the offer is good or bad, right?
So you're, like,
looking at the mileage, you're looking at the time,
you're driving in traffic.
You have 20 seconds to go yes or no, right?
Oh, wow.
Okay. So if you accept a low ball offer,
your next offer is lower, and it keeps pushing you down, right?
Uh, now,
if you're picky, it's higher.
And then if you start taking the low ball offers,
they sneak into there, they push it down again.
So whatever it is, that's your side hustle that lets you Be picky,
eventually you lose it. Wait, that's.
That's the Uber algorithm doing that to its own drivers.
To drivers, yeah.
So this is algorithm to push their wages down.
That's how. That's how Uber got profitable,
right? For 13 years,
they lost $31 billion of the Saudi royal family's money.
41 cents on every dollar they brought in.
They pissed away. They eventually, like,
put all the other cab companies out of business.
Induced a lost decade in transit investment.
Became the only game in town.
Started screwing the drivers and started raising prices on riders.
And they decoupled riders from drivers.
You remember, it used to be if you got surge priced for the ride,
you were paying for. They got surge,
paid for the ride, they delivered.
Now it's totally decoupled.
That's decoupled. It's. It's.
It's like,
it's bizarre world Marxism where you pay according to your ability,
and they work according to their need.
It's enshittification. It goes back to the other book. It's.
It's that enshittification.
That is enshittification. So I.
I'm gonna make you really angry here.
Oh, don't,
Corey. What?
No. Groundwork Collaborative in the Roosevelt Institute.
So Groundwork Collaborative is Lindsay Owens outfit.
And the. And the Roosevelt Institute published report on nurses. Right.
So used to be contract nurses were hired through,
like, a local body shop,
a staffing agency. Right.
The travel nurses and people like that.
Yeah. Yeah.
Now it's four. Four national apps that compete with each other.
They All call themselves Uber for nursing.
So maybe you can see where this is going.
Oh, boy.
They buy credit card data from data brokers.
And the more outstanding credit card debt you have,
the lower the wage you're offered.
Oh, my fucking god.
Because it's a desperation premium,
right? The company that you're working for
looks to see your level of desperation
so that they can lowball you. And. And so.
So, John,
like me, you have heard of Tennessee,
Ernie Ford, you know that there are coal bosses
who would have done this shit if they could have, right?
But they weren't going to be able to hire the army of Pinkertons
to follow every coal miner around
and figure out who's in the most debt.
And then get the boiler room full of guys in green eye shades
to Mark up the ledgers and change their wages 10 times a minute, right?
This is the thing you need AI for.
This is what automation gets you on the wage side,
and the same thing is happening on the price side.
Where, again,
like it used to be, demographers would do this kind of cute
madman style thing where they'd be like,
we got the little old ladies who own seven cats who live in Sheboygan,
and we've got this and that. We.
They would go do focus groups.
AI just naively buckets people into groups based on behavioral data
and then automatically runs experiments to see
The highest price they will accept