I do not think it is cynical to assume that Microsoft would sell this to companies as a way to do constant surveillance of their employees with OCR and LLMs used to make it easier for a manager to sift through massive amounts of data.
That's just an actual use case that their true customers would pay for, I think it's awful and should be illegal under any reasonable worker protections but why would they not advertise it this way privately to business customers?
I also don't think it's cynical to think that a manager looking for a reason to get rid of someone will have a much easier time justifying a PIP or just straight up firing someone if they can retroactively have an AI do it for them.
Why wouldn't they be able to ask the system "how much of <employee they don't like>'s time do they spend doing things on the computer that are not directly related to <company name>?"
Is it technically happening already? Sure, there's nasty nasty spyware being forced on people and it is awful and I hate that those employers are getting away with it. But integrated into the OS, on by default, with a long memory? Just imagine how easy it will be to fire anyone that tries to unionize in an effort to fight against such surveillance.
That's just an actual use case that their true customers would pay for, I think it's awful and should be illegal under any reasonable worker protections but why would they not advertise it this way privately to business customers?
I also don't think it's cynical to think that a manager looking for a reason to get rid of someone will have a much easier time justifying a PIP or just straight up firing someone if they can retroactively have an AI do it for them.
Why wouldn't they be able to ask the system "how much of <employee they don't like>'s time do they spend doing things on the computer that are not directly related to <company name>?"
Is it technically happening already? Sure, there's nasty nasty spyware being forced on people and it is awful and I hate that those employers are getting away with it. But integrated into the OS, on by default, with a long memory? Just imagine how easy it will be to fire anyone that tries to unionize in an effort to fight against such surveillance.