4 ideas
The Machinehood, a militant group, attacks pill producers and issues an ultimatum demanding that pill production stop within a week. Welga's investigation, alongside her sister-in-law Nithya, a biologist, shows that a worker's body carries the hidden cost of an economy built on chemical enhancement.
Gig workers stream their work through camera drones and earn much of their income from viewer tips instead of wages. This makes every job a performance. Workers who are more dramatic, more dangerous, or more visible earn more, so the attention economy pays people for spectacle and risk rather than for the value of the work.
When humans must compete with machines on speed and endurance, performance-enhancing drugs become effectively mandatory rather than optional. Workers can match automation only by treating their own bodies as machines to be tuned and eventually used up. The long-term biological damage falls on individual workers, while the productivity gains go to employers and platforms.
The Machinehood groups humans and AIs together as one exploited class of laborers. Seen this way, AI rights and worker rights become the same political question.