Four years ago, Mark Zuckerberg, feeling like the admiral of the good ship Meta Platforms Inc., sent a memo to employees encouraging them to refer to themselves by the nautical term “Metamates,” apparently to foster a sense of camaraderie and shared mission or something. Now he plans to spy on his own Metamates to help train the robots that will someday throw them overboard. They ought to mutiny.

Meta plans to put tracking software on its employees’ computers to track their mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes, Reuters reported on Tuesday. It will also randomly capture images of its workers’ screens every now and then. All of this is meant to help train AI models to better mimic what human beings do when they work on computers, including tricky stuff like using drop-down menus. One reason to do such a thing is to help eventually replace those humans with AI models, which don’t require paychecks or health insurance or common courtesy.

In Zuckerberg’s February 2022 memo, he suggested his employees adopt a motto of “Meta, Metamates, Me.” This borrowed from a U.S. Navy saying, “Ship, shipmates, self.” In the Navy’s context, it means that, when your ship is on fire or its toilets don’t work or some other emergency, your first priority is taking care of the ship. Your shipmates are your next concern. Only after they’re safe can you think about yourself.

This hierarchy makes sense in a military context, where one willingly signs away one’s life to be a weapon for one’s country. It makes less sense in the context of writing computer code for a company that began as a website for ranking women by hotness and has since transitioned to other pursuits such as democracy-poisoning, virtual reality and, lately, artificial intelligence.

Meta’s tracking, known as the Model Capability Initiative, will apply only to work-related apps and sites, according to the internal memo Reuters obtained. So supposedly it won’t teach robots how to order from DoorDash or Amazon, wasteful things humans often do instead of working. Nor will it be used for performance evaluations or other human-relations purposes, a Meta spokesperson reassured everybody. Its sole purpose is to “help our models get better simply ⁠by doing their daily work,” according to the memo.

But, even if you set aside panopticon-related concerns, this is still not good news for Metamates. The MCI will be just part of a broader data-harvesting campaign in service of AI for Work, Meta’s self-described “effort to integrate AI into every tool, team, and process at Meta.”

That will necessarily mean fewer human workers; by May 20, in fact, there will be about 8,000 fewer of those, according to an earlier Reuters report. Meta plans to lay off that many Metamates, or about 10% of its total workforce, on that date. And that will just be the first round of job cuts. The second, of what could be a similar size, will come later in the year.

Meta’s expensive investment in AI is partly to blame. The company recently projected capital spending of $115 billion to $135 billion this year, more than double 2025’s spree, most of which is going toward AI. Human paychecks must be sacrificed to help cover the costs.

But Zuckerberg also clearly expects robots to replace those employees, telling Joe Rogan last year that he expected to soon have “an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code.” If you are currently a mid-level engineer at Meta, this can’t be reassuring. Knowing that your keystrokes and mouse clicks are helping to hasten your replacement, then perhaps you will be motivated to keystroke and mouse-click much less productively.

This also speaks to the broader zeitgeist, in which 55% of Americans think AI will do them more harm than good, including taking their jobs. They have little faith it will be of much benefit to anyone but the CEOs like Zuckerberg who are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make it happen.

Meta’s stock price has gone basically nowhere for the past two years. Investors may be waiting to see if Zuckerberg’s massive investment in AI goes any better than his massive, failed investment in the Metaverse (remember that?). If his robots don’t live up to his hopes, then he may well find he has fewer willing and able hands on deck to steer him to his next misadventure.

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