This isn’t the first time that the fantasy of automation doesn’t match up with reality. Tech companies all too often (misleadingly) promote their latest product to be far more intelligent than it actually is, all the while relying upon a team of invisible workers behaving like machines to make the device appear to function. For example, “self driving” cars such as Amazon’s robotaxi service depend on a team of human workers to remotely drive the car when they struggle to drive themselves. If we go way back to the 18th century, the Mechanical Turk was presented to the public as a chess-playing automaton, but in reality it was an elaborate hoax with a chessmaster controlling it from the inside. It’s what Astra Taylor calls fauxtomation: a marketing ploy to make pointless products seem cutting-edge. Or what Jathan Sadowski calls Potemkin AI: it provides a convenient way to rationalise unseen exploitation while calling it progress.