Your Boss Is a Piece of Software
Surveillance is coming soon to an office near you (if it's not already watching)
For almost four years Stephen Normandin delivered packages for Amazon in Phoenix. He enjoyed the work and was good at it. A 63-year-old Army veteran, he ran his routes out of a 2002 Toyota Corolla, earning excellent ratings and learning the local routes well enough that he was asked to train others. In August, his managers at Amazon changed his taskload, now handing him predawn stops at locked apartment complexes and delivery lockers that would not open. As he troubleshot the snags for 30 minutes with Amazon’s internal support hotline, his ratings sank.
Weeks later he was fired via a letter which cited his falling delivery efficiency scores. His manager had not been involved; the software decided on its own. “There are a lot of things the algorithms don’t take into account,” Normandin told Bloomberg, “and the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”
What happened to Normandin wasn’t an isolated instance. It was an example of how modern workforce management is designed to operate. Your boss used to keep tabs on you, take responsibility for your growth in your role, and decide your long-term status. Now every phase of employment — hiring, monitoring, and firing — is increasingly handled by automated systems of surveillance and evaluation. You may work as much for an algorithm (or several) as for any human being.
In a 2025 survey of 1,500 American employers by the security firm ExpressVPN, 61 percent said they use AI to measure productivity, and 67 percent said they collect biometric data to track behavior and attendance. Researchers have a name for the shift: algorithmic management, meaning the use of software rather than supervisors to assign work, rate it, and decide who is falling behind. A human manager can watch a handful of people. Software can — in at least some senses — watch everyone, all the time, and forget nothing. It’s like a basketball game without referees where the outcome is decided by instant replay.
Americans do not approve of this approach. In a 2023 Pew Research poll, 71 percent opposed letting AI make the final decision in hiring, and by a margin of 55 to 14 percent of those surveyed rejected the idea of a machine deciding who should be fired. The lack of support is across the board; Americans disapprove of surveillance, evaluation, and dismissal by AI.
The law is only slowly catching up. Europe’s AI Act treats software that manages and evaluates workers as high risk, its most tightly regulated category (aside from “unacceptable risk,” which is banned entirely). In March of 2026 the EU’s Internal Market and Civil Liberties committee proposed to delay those rules, and its Parliament backed the postponement in August 2026. In the United States, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned in 2024 that the secret algorithmic scores used to hire, promote, and fire people can count as consumer reports, which give workers the right to see their file and dispute what is in it. A few short months later, the bureau withdrew the guidance. The debate is stalled at the federal level.
That brings the fight to the states, where support is mixed. So far, California has come closest to acting. State senator Jerry McNerney’s No Robo Bosses Act would have put a human being back in the loop in cases like Stephen Normandin’s, requiring that all automated decisions to discipline or fire a worker be conducted by an employee and mandating that employers disclose when an algorithm is used for judging. It cleared the state Senate 28 to 9 but Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it in October 2025, calling it too broad. New York weighed its own bill, the Bossware and Oppressive Technologies Act, which would limit electronic monitoring and require notice before a machine renders a verdict on someone’s livelihood. It remains stuck in the New York State Senate's Labor Committee, where it has sat without a vote since April 2025.
The legality of worker surveillance has nothing to do with how powerful the machines are. The question is whether a worker has a right not to be judged by code as opposed to a colleague who can be shown the evidence to discuss before rendering judgement. Normandin was denied that right. The program ran, made a judgment, and sent an email before locking him out of the system.
When software decides you are finished, who is left to appeal to? For a growing number of Americans, the answer is a name on an email sent by the same bot that surveilled them.
Reuben Steiger is a writer and entrepreneur based in Princeton, NJ. Over a 25-year career he has helped start companies including Second Life and has led global innovation for companies including Interpublic and Omnicom. His current focus is the scaling and adoption of AI technologies. He collects books about the future.
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