This photo of Jodie Herrera’s reproductive freedom mural was provided by the ACLU of New Mexico. See more of Herrera’s work here.

Even though the Trump administration has ended, threats to reproductive rights have not. In the first months of 2021, states have introduced nearly 400 measures to restrict access to abortion in an effort to push abortion further out of reach or force the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade entirely. But reproductive freedom advocates aren’t taking this assault on our rights lightly: We’re fighting back. There are bright spots on the horizon. Just last month, our state, New Mexico, successfully repealed an abortion ban that had been on the books since 1969, and that we had been fighting to end for years.

We can’t understate the importance of this victory. If we hadn’t successfully removed the ban, and Roe were to fall, patients at any stage of pregnancy could have been forced to beg for permission to have an abortion in front of a panel of strangers. Anyone who performed an abortion outside of this inhumane process could have been charged with a felony. People receiving this care also could have been investigated and charged. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, outdated abortion bans still technically in place in other states could go back into effect.

New Mexicans no longer have to fear that reality. On February 26, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed S.B. 10, the Respect New Mexico Women and Families Act, into law. This bill is a repeal of New Mexico’s old, outdated abortion ban. It is validation of what we know: New Mexicans have long believed that politicians do not have any place in a person’s reproductive health care.

This victory did not come out of nowhere. In fact, efforts to repeal this ban failed before, in 2017, 2018, and again in 2019. We were several votes short just because of a few conservative lawmakers in the New Mexico Senate. In 2019 the measure failed by just three votes. So last May, we promised to work not only with our longstanding community partners and allied elected officials, but with our national organization to hold those lawmakers accountable. And that’s exactly what we did.

Together, the ACLU of New Mexico and the national ACLU organized a voter education and mobilization campaign. This voter education campaign zeroed in on key districts of state senators who voted to keep the abortion ban in 2019. In response, New Mexicans showed up and sent a clear message to these lawmakers: We support abortion rights. As a result, we wound up with a legislature that was willing to repeal this outdated law.

Then, we set our legislative strategy into motion. The Respect New Mexico Women and Families Act is a reminder of why efforts like these need to be led by on-the-ground activists and advocates. The Respect New Mexico Coalition in particular, co-chaired by Black and Indigenous women, has been a critical leader in this fight for years. As an intersectional movement of women, families, faith leaders, and medical providers, Indigenous, Black, and Latinx reproductive justice leaders alongside reproductive rights advocates, this coalition embodies what we know to be true: Reproductive health care impacts everyone in a community, and so must our organizing.

The bill had widespread support from a huge range of communities. Birth workers, nurses, and doctors testified and wrote public comments supporting the bill and their associations endorsed repeal. Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian leaders, religious leaders, legal experts, LGBTQ-plus folks, people of color, and people from rural communities all supported this bill. Both teenagers and people who experienced the world before Roe v. Wade supported this bill.

Several organizations worked with local artists to commission posters, murals, and other art to inspire respect for what reproductive justice looks like. The ACLU of New Mexico sponsored a mural by New Mexican artist and advocate Jodie Herrera. State Rep. Micaela Lara Cadena and state Sen. Linda Lopez, both women of color, were the fearless lead sponsors on this bill; they were joined by Speaker of the New Mexico House Brian Egolf, Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth, Reps. Joanne Ferrary, Georgene Louis, and Debbie Armstrong. And, 23 other state senators signed onto S.B. 10 when it was introduced.

The consequences of this win extend beyond our state. With attacks on abortion access in Arizona and the constant barrage of anti-abortion measures in Texas, it is critical that New Mexico remain a haven for reproductive health care for all pregnant people. As states around the country continue to dismantle abortion protection and access, we can now start to look forward and work to expand access to care, making abortion care, birth control, and period products even more equitably available, improving gender equity, and increasing training opportunities among medical professionals and birth workers to prevent maternal and infant mortality.

So, here is what we know: When we work together, locally and nationally, and mobilize all of our resources, we win. And that’s what we’ll continue to do. Together, our legislatures can reflect the will and needs of communities across the country.

Last month we learned that Amazon is planning to deploy AI cameras that will constantly scrutinize drivers inside the cabins of its delivery vehicles, and inform their bosses when the camera thinks they’ve done something questionable.

The device Amazon is installing (called “Driveri,” pronounced “driver eye”) has cameras pointing in four directions, one of which is toward the driver. In a video posted online, the company says the “camera records 100 percent of the time when you’re out on your route,” and watches for 16 behaviors that will “trigger Driveri to upload recorded footage.” These include not only accidents but also such things as following another car too closely, making a U-turn, failing to wear the seatbelt, obstructing the camera, “hard” braking or accelerating, and appearing to be distracted or drowsy — or what the AI interprets as those activities, anyway. Sometimes the robot camera will shout commands at you, such as “maintain safe distance!” or “please slow down!” One driver told CNBC that if the camera catches you yawning, it will tell you to pull over for at least 15 minutes — and if you don’t comply, you may get a call from your boss.

The cameras in this system are not streamed live to management; this is an AI monitoring system. The device itself decides when to send video clips to the bosses and when to issue verbal alerts to drivers. But as we have long argued, nobody should make the mistake of thinking that we can’t suffer many forms of privacy harm when being monitored by machines, not least because those machines are programmed to “snitch” to actual humans when they see something they think is bad. The company that makes Driveri, Netradyne, also advertises that its product keeps scores on drivers that are updated — and provided to management — in real time. (Such a function is not mentioned in Amazon’s video).

Given how bad AI is at understanding the subtleties of human behavior and dealing with anomalies, this system could lead to real fairness and accuracy issues. Automated test proctoring software, which also uses video to monitor people for subtle behaviors (in this case, cheating) has certainly been rife with bias and accuracy problems. Machine vision is very brittle and can fail spectacularly — even at the fundamentals, like recognizing a stop sign. Netradyne boasts that “every stop sign & traffic signal is identified and analyzed for compliance measurement.” But what happens when the AI thinks it sees a stop sign where there is none, and flags the driver for “running” it?

Ideally a human being would review the video and exonerate the driver, but given how automated Amazon’s management is, we don’t know how often that will happen. Workers in Amazon’s warehouses, for example, are constantly supervised by robots that judge whether they’re moving packages quickly enough. If they don’t like what they see, those robots issue warnings and even fire workers automatically — without any human input.

Amazon touts the system as a beneficial safety measure. It could indeed reduce accidents — though that should be proven — but as a society we’re going to need to figure out how much to allow ourselves to be overseen by automated AI cameras that engage in intrusive monitoring, judging, nagging, and reporting of our behaviors. Potential fairness issues aside, that kind of monitoring would probably make anyone miserable. There are almost certainly ways to be found to use AI to protect the safety of workers that feel empowering and protective, instead of infantilizing and oppressive.

Meanwhile, this kind of robot monitoring is becoming an increasingly prominent sore spot for workers. Some UPS drivers, for example, have opposed that company’s use of such cameras. (UPS drivers, unlike Amazon’s, are unionized and actually employed by the company whose uniforms they wear.)

Amazon workers’ complaints about robot management are part of growing labor tensions and criticism of the company for unethical labor practices. The company has been sued by the New York attorney general for failing to protect workers against COVID-19 and retaliating against those who complained, and was fined last month by the Federal Trade Commission for stealing workers’ tips. Amazon drivers in particular reportedly face brutal working conditions, and critics charge that the company places performance demands on them that pressure them to drive dangerously fast, while evading responsibility for the resulting accidents by insisting that they’re contractors. The Amazon drivers I have spoken to confirmed that they are urged to drive safely but also pushed to complete an unrealistic number of deliveries within a shift.

Driveri thus looks like a company’s attempt to use technology to solve a problem that its own managerial practices and profit drive may be creating. These technologies are like factory farms that pump our food with antibiotics — an attempt to use technology to unnaturally suppress the side effects of unhealthy and inhumane practices. This is something that we’ve already seen in the trucking industry: Instead of giving drivers protections from unhealthy productivity demands, they get micro-surveillance. And workers end up squeezed on both ends.

That squeeze may only increase as the AI is refined. For example, if sunglasses defeat Driveri’s drowsiness and inattentiveness detectors, drivers may be told they aren’t allowed to wear them. That could be just the beginning of many ways they are forced to conform their behavior, movements, and dress to the needs of the AI that is watching them. We’ve already seen that happen in other areas; we’re no longer allowed to smile in our passport photos, for example, because it reduces the effectiveness of face recognition technology. Ultimately, the technology threatens to enable a modern-day version of Taylorism, a 19th century industrial movement also known as “scientific management” that involved monitoring and controlling the minutiae of industrial workers’ bodily movements to maximize their productivity.

The issues raised by AI video monitoring extend far beyond Amazon and its particular practices. To begin with, Amazon is not the only company experimenting with this kind of robot surveillance; a number of trucking companies, for example, are imposing it on their drivers. More broadly, as AI cameras get smarter, there are many institutions that have different incentives to use them to visually monitor people. We could soon see not just employers but also everything from museums to restaurants to government agencies deploying this technology — anyone who wants to enforce a rule, protect an asset, or gain a new efficiency.

Technological monitoring of workers has long taken place through other data-collection devices, down to and including the time clock, but these new tools don’t require expensive or specialized data-collection devices, or efforts to get workers to use them properly. All that’s needed is a camera. And improving AI is likely to open up ever-wider possibilities for automated visual monitoring, as we discussed in our 2019 report, The Dawn of Robot Surveillance.

Employees like drivers and factory workers whose jobs are most at risk of being supplanted by AI (but for now are just being integrated with it) will be the first to be placed under oppressive AI surveillance microscopes, and we should support their rights to maximize their self-determination through unionization and other measures. But AI monitoring will soon move beyond those groups, starting with less powerful people across our society — who, like Amazon’s nonmanagerial workforce, are disproportionately people of color and are likely to continue to bear the brunt of that surveillance. And ultimately, in one form or another, such monitoring is likely to affect everyone — and in the process, further tilt power toward those who already have it.