[2099miles]

Tbh this isn’t that crazy. If you hire someone to do their job outputting 10 items per hour and that number is reasonable because a bunch of other workers you hired for the same job are doing it and 1 guy hits 1 per hour then that guys shouldn’t be doing that job.

The outrage should be focused on the absolute meme of their ad video cuz they were like “lets literally have a convo with an individual but refer to them as a workspace and have them say human painful responses but then just shit on them anyway impersonally”

The product is not crazy. The video is wild.

[trunch]

Because this will definitely be used only to innocently tell off people doing 1/10 the work of everyone else, and not micromanage and hound people to increasingly unrealistic standards in already desperate conditions.

Safe to say you aren't in any position where every move you make will be watched by AI and analysed for faults so that your boss can scream at you more efficiently whenever you don't meet standards for their pitiful wages.

[_DeadFred_]

It's also dumb from a factory prospective. Our factories did time studies to understand things. What we learned:

Certain lines are primarily made up of barely functioning older people. No one else sticks around in those jobs. Think barely functioning alcoholic or recovering alcoholics that have nothing. However we would also get a few 18 year olds with no idea how jobs/work works and or zero accountability (they just ghost jobs).

From the numbers we should want to build our processes around the high performers. But we can't expand our base of high performers AND they are the most likely to just disappear and not easily have their productivity replaced.

So yes, it was correct that 10% of our people outperformed by 10X, and yes, it was smart to not try to improve that but to understand reality.

[tmpz22]

> From the numbers we should want to build our processes around the high performers. But we can't expand our base of high performers AND they are the most likely to just disappear and not easily have their productivity replaced.

You're failing to retain high performers? Are there perhaps methods for retaining high performers that you have not tried?

AI for Executive performance monitoring would be an interesting social experiment.

[infecto]

Do you really think this tool is making folks micromanage and abuse employees or perhaps they already would be doing that and this tool helps it?

There can be real value in these types of tools, its ultimately up to the implementation and I don't believe this tool will somehow make a happy work environment into an abusive one, the abuse will have most likely already existed.

[johnnyanmac]

>or perhaps they already would be doing that and this tool helps it?

Yes. I don't think we should ethically encourage the abuse of workers. And that official lens of marketing can and will shape who reaches out, even if the tool can indeed be used ethically. Framing is key.

As a tame example: think of the graphic design and marketing of red bull vs Monster. They have the same basic ingredients and purpose but that simple red bull design vs the in-your-face punk-esque vibe of Monster will change who buys it, how they identify with it, and even alter the perception of how it tastes.

[latexr]

> and this tool helps it

And that is bad.

> the abuse will have most likely already existed.

The abuse will get worse. The correct ethical answer to “the conditions are bad” is “improve the conditions” not “make them worse”.

[rimbo789]

Absolutely I expect it to be used to micromanage and abuse. Yes those behaviours already exist that’s why I know a tool that enables them will amphifly them

[BriggyDwiggs42]

The incentive is almost universally to micromanage and abuse employees. Reducing the friction will increase the incidence.

[pluto_modadic]

picture this: corporate buys something (like O365), and is reluctant to end licensing for the bundle. So... if they're locked into a contract that includes management-abuse-as-a-service, enabling bad behaviors, do you think they'll back out of enabling that one abusive manager out of five? how will that impact the workforce?

[mjmsmith]

Maybe the implementation could include an option to show the worker's name.

[fvdessen]

Shouldn't the manager of the 'bunch of workers' notice the guy is underperforming and understand why ? Maybe that manager is the one that shouldn't be doing that job

[hnthrow90348765]

And they do that by either looking over your shoulder (1 person at a time) or collecting metrics on the entire team and the output. Both of these have different downsides.

The biggest issue is leadership or managers always wanting the number to go up from the individual. "We need 12 widgets per hour instead of 10 for just this one quarter bro" but then that becomes the new norm and eventually "We need 14/16/18/20 widgets per hour..."

It's boiling frog management that makes people distrust managers doing any kind of performance monitoring

[neofrommatrix]

But that would increase their cortisol, according to the founders.

[froh]

yah this is exactly what labor law says in some countries: a manager standing behind your desk? ok. a machine surveilling you? not ok.

[sarchertech]

Yeah it’s a matter of scale. The manager can’t stand behind your desk and watch you all day every day. AI can.

[ignoramous]

> Tbh this isn’t that crazy.

Yep, seems like a bog standard accountability / performance management.

> The product is not crazy. The video is wild.

This is how it all starts. Sane solutions wielded by madmen.

[ouraf]

We already advanced beyond Taylorism's myopic time-motion glorification. This isn't a tool to improve the process, but to push the employee towards the meat grinder rather than look for a more intelligent approach (matching an employee's tasks and abilities rather than just giving him a red rating and ugly performance numbers)

[2099miles]

Continued rant :

It’s kinda like a ruler. If you measure workers so that one’s doing 10x less/worse output than the average that’s good.

If you compare workers down to the .01% difference in output that’s stupid and inhumane.

[yogurt-male]

Yes, but many business owners/managers are stupid and inhumane.

[Brendinooo]

Yeah. I did new car prep for a dealership as a teen.

Ask me how many cars I did per day: totally reasonable. Make me clock in and out for every car I work on: bad.

[carabiner]

This is normal Indian work culture. You can also guess in most cases, the factory workers are a different caste from the managers.

[bargainbin]

So you’d be ok with this AI being applied to other industries? Maybe lines of code?

[oulipo]

The product is shit. At some point we have to put human decency first, and not lock people in AI-surveilled setups.

If you're worried about some guy slacking, then hire some supervisors, ask them to chat with the employees, understand what their issues come from, if they had a rough week and they need some slack, etc.

But doing it impersonally through an AI is inhumane.

Imagine if you have kids and we replace all their teachers with just a camera and an AI, that "teaches them to write" and then nag them if they're not "as good as their classmates" or whatever... that would be insane. Kids are meant to be loved and grow with care.

Well, guess what, grown ups too. Job or no job. We're not here "in order to make money for the bosses", but just to all contribute in a just and useful manner to society. And so workers need to do their part of the job, but bosses need also to respect the humanity and decency of workers. It goes both ways.

[fat_cantor]

Yet this is exactly how educational curricula are being developed right now - AI generates lesson plan based upon standards (easier for teachers), teacher feeds in reading assignment, etc., AI generates quiz and grades responses. Maybe there's human oversight, maybe not, but the education industry is largely embracing this AI control layer without much hesitation because it reduces cortisol for everyone except students.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

When the only way you’re able to see education is through the lens of job training and value production, you won’t give a shit about the experience of students. How can one measure the students’ suffering in terms of dollar bills? Same attitude used everywhere, but more egregious because it’s done to kids.

[kissgyorgy]

It's clear you never worked in a factory and you have just as much empathy as these CS grads. This kind of thinking why I hate capitalism so much.

I worked in a factory multiple times and I can tell from experience nobody needs a stupid performance measurement like this. Your manager will make sure you work you ass off. Or you work with a big dangerous machine so you have to pay very much attention all day. Of course not every factory is the same, but putting even more pressure to factory workers like this is just inhumane and the most capitalist move I can imagine. Next step is to put robotic whips next to the lines and when their productivity goes below a specific value hit them automatically... Literal slavery.

[Brendinooo]

I mean, if you're gonna make this kind of software to track individuals, you could, at bare minimum, throw a name in there so that the supervisor doesn't have start the chat with "hey number seventeen".

If literally having your identity reduced to a number in the process of getting yelled at for not being productive doesn't seem bad/crazy to you, I'm guessing there isn't anything I could say to move you.

[yogurt-male]

Looking for 10x discrepancies is not how this will be used, and you know it. Adoption of this sort of tech is going to lead to Amazon "peeing in bottles" situations. It's wild how much faith people have in the ethics of business owners, especially the ultra-wealthy.

[happytoexplain]

This is idealistic. In reality, we have more control over tools than how they are used - in general we have more control over changes earlier in the pipeline. Precious little control, but more control.

[pera]

Your example sounds reasonable but it's not realistic: The actual use of this type of tools is to intimidate those workers who have outputted 9.8 items instead of the average 9.9 over the past week.

This is how our society ended up making Amazon delivery workers urinating in fucking bottles inside their trucks.

[solardev]

You've spent 32.8 seconds urinating this shift, 1.3 seconds longer than average. Your bonus has been reduced until performance meets standards. At Amazon, the customer comes first!

Congratulations! This week your urination schedule has improved. Enjoy a Kindle credit on us, good for any ebook license under $2.99. At Amazon, our partners come first!

[ryandrake]

I wish entrepreneurs would stop trying to make Manna[1] a reality. It's supposed to be a dystopia, people. Stop trying to create it!

1: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

[solardev]

Fun story, thanks for sharing! Seems pretty inevitable... the Elon Musks of the world would love this. Luxury living for the 1%, fully automated indentured servitude for the rest of us.

But at least we'll have nice text to speech in the headsets, hopefully.

[ryandrake]

Kind of like the movie Elysium but without the space station. Somehow, making dystopias into reality seems like a sort of weird moral imperative to a lot of tech people. I guess techies (wrongly) think that they'll somehow end up on the side of the 1%.

[solardev]

As long as we have hierarchical social systems, there'll always be people happy to step on the 90% if that means they can be part of the 10%. And many tech workers do fall into that bucket :/ As a group, we're not exactly known for our ethics or social benevolence...