When you say 'catastrophic,' whose overtime do you mean
Let's underline the sentence Eggers is reported to have told OpenAI staff: "The effect of ChatGPT on educators' lives is catastrophic... you've made every teacher's life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago." The company isn't struggling; it's profitable. But the real content of 'catastrophic' is a teacher's unpaid evening hours spent trying to tell whether a composition was written by a student or a chatbot. That labor shows up on nobody's balance sheet.[1]
A student's stolen voice is also a labor loss: learning to write means accumulating a skill, and that skill loss is an economic one too. Efficiency is never neutral; here 'efficiency' shows up in how fast the assignment gets finished, the loss in the student's future capacity to write. The way I'd rather see Mews's candor, I'd rather see Eggers's bluntness too — but a company hearing this critique at an internal event and offering no public accounting for it is not acceptable.[1]
An hour-long pause, a permanent transfer of risk
Waymo paused service for an hour during an outage affecting 7,000 households in San Francisco — the third repeat after December and the Fourth of July. Underline the spokesperson's phrase 'temporary adjustments': the ones who couldn't foresee the disruption are the riders, not the company. That's exactly why Mayor Lurie is pushing for emergency rules — who carries the risk in a crisis matters more than who operates the autonomy.[2]
On one side, a one-hour service pause; on the other, a three-time repeat pattern — the company isn't struggling, it keeps expanding in San Francisco. My guess: the rules Lurie is asking for reach the state legislature within months, demanding emergency-protocol transparency from robotaxi operators. Labor's exhaust runs through the same pipe here too — this time what's flowing isn't a driver's, but a city's trust in a crisis. I'd like Waymo to write its plan down plainly enough that it can't dodge it.[2]