In previous work, I have argued that consent and risk are insufficiently protected social relations in regulatory environments related to AI and data. Avenues for meaningful (human) consent to data collection are depleting, even as ‘reasonable’ (human) risk parameters in AI testing environments are expanding. The AI Act’s harmonisation activities coincide with the EU’s new Digital [+ AI] Omnibus’s simplification agenda, which may cement reductions for what we are calling ‘conscious sociality’. Where European legal frameworks have to an extent always protected personhood, profile accuracy, and privacy, and now prohibit ‘nudification’, they certainly have not prevented numerous agentic AI data breaches, nor allowed better consultation, much less proportionality against business interests. The once-centered human once featured within Industry 5.0, is being re-centered, and even removed. AI advancements threaten our very subjectivities but any protection of personhood or ‘humanness’ at work, is already almost entirely absent. Precise typologies that protect difference and not just meaning, but what we argue as ‘conscious’ qualities of work are missing. We argue that just ‘centering’ humans was not enough, and asking all humans to be represented on the homogenous platform being forced into European law, and humanness at work must reflect consciousness now, to be legitimate. Which conscious social relations are less likely to prolong in current work environments, where AI is presented as a fait accomplis? If approved ultimately, the Omnibus amendments on consent, definitions for personal data, and truncated and ‘simplified’ compliance standards, will degrade workers from a once protected role as ‘data subjects’, to ‘data producers’, and turn human populations into a testbed for AI testing by Big Tech powers, where ‘data subjects’ become ‘test subjects’. The talk is about the neglected centre now of humans, social relations, and finally consciousness, to identify what is left out, and what is at stake, for workers in the AI Omnibus overhaul today.
Phoebe V Moore works as Professor of Management & the Futures of Work, University of Essex, within the Management & Marketing group within Essex Business School (EBS), Colchester, England (2022 – present). (2023). Her publications include The Quantified Self in Precarity Work, Technology and What Counts (Routledge, 2017) and two books she co-edited, Augmented exploitation: Artificial intelligence, automation and work (Pluto Press, 2021) and Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023).
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