The government of Ontario has taken a sensible first step in requiring publicly advertised job postings to include any role artificial intelligence (AI) may have in hiring. Employers with 25 or more employees and who use artificial intelligence to screen, assess or select applicants must say so. That’s good.

But this reform also shows how narrow the public conversation remains. It makes AI visible at the point of hiring, but leaves too much of workplace AI in the dark as to how it assigns work, measures performance, sets targets and triggers discipline. Canada’s recently announced artificial intelligence strategy doesn’t go any further. It treats AI as a democratic concern and names hiring as one area where AI systems will make “consequential decisions about Canadians’ lives.”

Yet it frames workplace AI mainly around skills, adoption and productivity. That is where the deeper problem lies. AI does not just help manage work. It writes the rules.

Public anxiety about AI and work usually settles on one pervasive fear: Machines will wipe out jobs and leave workers behind. But technology does not simply eliminate work. It reorganizes it. Some jobs disappear. New ones emerge. Entire sectors are remade. But the deeper shift is harder to see and easier to normalize. Decisions once made by supervisors, managers and human resources staff are increasingly shaped by computers that sort, score, predict and nudge. The real threat is not unemployment. It is the steady erosion of workers’ power, autonomy and bargaining capacity.

Surveillance is no longer a big enough word for this problem. Surveillance implies distance. Work is watched from the outside, recorded after the fact and then acted on. AI-driven management goes further. It enters the workplace’s........

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