Watch This Startup Pitch Dystopian Sweatshop-Monitoring Software

Following intense backlash, startup accelerator Y Combinator quietly pulled a video from its X account demonstrating a new startup’s AI-powered worker monitoring software. The startup, called Optifye, says on its website that it is developing “AI line optimization for manual assembly” that can boost efficiency by up to 30%. That sounds anodyne enough until you watch the video. “Thirty-seven percent line efficiency? That’s bad,” the video starts, as a young man looks at a dashboard showing the supposed performance metrics of a specific worker on a manufacturing line. The man calls his “supervisor,” who looks at a dashboard filled with red and begins haranguing the worker, whom he refers not by name but only as “Workspace 17,” over a video feed pointing down at the worker’s station. The worker pleads that he has been working all day, only for the manager to look at another dashboard and retort, “you haven’t even hit your hourly output once today, and you had 11.4% efficiency.” How that ... Read full article.