Frederick Taylor would have LOVED AI being used to surveil workers

PLUS the unofficial Rolling Stones sponsorship of my 19th Semantic Breakdown

Today I had considerable difficulty writing this short piece. We are currently on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, reggae music is playing as I sip a cacao martini after a day on a near perfect beach. I wipe a tear from my eye, call for another (all true except the tear), take a deep breath and…. A frigging mosquito bit me and disturbed the entire scene. I’m BACK for some of my own bites!

QUICKBYTES: A little Organization Theory history to put modern AI into perspective (It’s fun, I promise!)

Well the image of the godfather wasn’t that much fun.

It has been 110 years since dear Freddy, picture above, died. He was the originator of Scientific Management whose goal was to “optimize industrial efficiency through systematic analysis and standardization”. I’m sure he was a lovely engineer; he just wanted to figure out the one perfect way to do every workplace task, then recruit and train workers to exactly perform these tasks quickly and identically. Doesn’t that sound all warm and fuzzy?

Curiously enough there was a backlash against Taylorism, claiming that it ignored worker rights, freedom and creativity in favour of a “cog in the wheel” approach. Scientific Management started to die out in the 1920s as humanistic approaches grew in vogue. However after a few generations of forgetfulness it came roaring back, like autocrats and anti-semitism, re-establishing itself first in our “modern” call centres.

Ideologically we evidently don’t improve once and for all, but merely go in decadal long cycles, ignorant of where we have been and where we are going.

Now Taylorism has a brand new tool: AI powered surveillance! Reading these two articles must bring massive smiles to the faces of those owners and managers that don’t trust remote workers, gig workers, lower paid workers. Let’s face it any workers. Most people evidently are lazy and distracted, not to to be trusted.

But pay particular attention to this new VC and AI backed surveillance beauty! This will really give future kingpins some real excitement if you catch my drift: “machine vision tracks workers’ hand movements and output so a boss can look at graphs “. Freddy must be clawing his way out of the grave as this is the perfect technology companion to make sure the riff-raff do each task the one and only right way.

I also write about entrepreneurship (TRUpreneur) so this will be one of my top software recommendations of 2025: Optifye.ai. Started by Duke University students (remember: decades of forgetfulness) whose families are long term factory owners; their childhoods obviously blighted by the carelessness of the workers they saw on the factory floor. Their innocuous product has been given pedal to metal financing from top VC Y Combinator.

For those who believe that we can learn from the past, you must be asking “when will get out of these new authoritarian workplaces?” Well we are in peak Taylorism (so 1910ish) and it didn’t really die until 1960 with the publication of a landmark book by Douglas MacGregor, which outlined Theory X and Y (look it up for more info as enough Organization Theory for one simple post). Just remember Y is the good one! Y’s time in the sun will return in 2075 or so if the current cycle holds true to form. Mind you by then AI could be in charge, so it isn’t a sure thing. Why you ask? Well AI models are being trained on today’s digital materiel; I doubt that humanist and classic liberal literature has been digitized.

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WORD SALAD - My 19th Semantic Breakdown

Cliché as the key to bad art

After Vladimir Nabokov

Also the key to bad communication

Specifically David Crouch

This section, which runs most Thursdays, is dedicated to my concerns with our societal semantic breakdown where the meanings of words have flattened and / or new cliquish connotations have emerged. The technology part of this is that the speed of vernacular change is greatly exacerbated on all and sundry platforms. Suddenly EVERYONE says weird for 6 weeks, then it peters out with only those least connected still saying it. (If you still saying weird, this is your permission to stop as we are now all laughing at you)

This is my 19th Semantic Breakdown sponsored by my teenage love of The Rolling Stones of the 1960s. I have put together something very special to commemorate this event. Let me break out my very own The Business Buzzwords for Miscommunication and Obscurity Playbook.

This playbook will level up up-and-comers by drinking the kool-aid of our best thought leaders. It addresses all your pain points with some out-of-the-box cheat codes. You will never need to circle or walk back anything again with this game-changing best of breed narratives. We will drill down through a series of deep dives to optimize your next-gen disruptive cope.

Look for the playbook everywhere you read words or hear people speaking!

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Well back to real life and the terrible decision of where to eat tonight. Thanks for all who read to here. Comments, feedback, back snarking, uncalled for criticism, a paltry little like: all are appreciated. Until Monday!