I don't hold Uber is very high regard, especially when it comes to ethical and moral decisions, but your comment comes with a certain amount of unfound malicious intent that simple hasn't been demonstrated in any of Kalanick's, or Uber's, actions.
We're talking about a company that wanted to dig up dirt on journalists.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/18/uber-exec...
However the claim "Kalanick has an ordered list of employees he's ready to fire until this thing goes away. [He probably did] hire someone just so he can fire them after a month or two." is absolutely unfounded and is based in such little reality that it doesn't belong here on HN.
The GP tried to support the probability of their supposition with an unrelated fact, which was called out.
A person hating puppies doesn't incline them towards murder any more than liking licorice, even if both might be considered by some to be signs of character flaw or moral failing. Sometimes when there's smoke, there's just some guy trying to have a cigarette in peace away from terrible, judgemental people.
a) you don't trust its value function to be just, or b) you believe it will be just, but you would rather cheat people by taking advantage of human faults like irrational emotions and imperfect memory
We can argue about a) but I can't respect position b).
This is interesting. If all men are created equal and had are grown in same environment then treating by a machine equally is just. But all men are not created equal and hence treating equally by a machine which decides their pay will be considered unjust by the lesser capable men. I am not saying it is just or unjust, just a possible thought process by an intellectually less capable men.
The problem is, how do you measure impact and performance? If you have someone on a team that spends a ton of time helping other engineers with their coding problems, their own commit rate will be lower. If you have someone who checks in a ton of code (not a great messure of ability), they may cause a ton of breakages and bugs for others, a detriment to the group overall.
Meritocracies can be gamed, and any measure you decide to track, will be gamed. At some point machines will definitely be able to track all of these data points, and incorporate them into a model, but it's still only going to have a view of the world based on the data it is fed.
This means that people will game it, and then you have a similar issue as today. While I agree with you in principle, the implementation will not be perfect.
I'm sure Uber hopes this is a best/least impact course of action for them to begin to erase last week's terrible publicity from everyone's minds.
They a. Fire someone who has only been there a month -- so don't lose too hard employee investment wise. b. Happened to find someone to fire who fits extremely well into a narrative that makes it appear as though they are toughening up and tackling the root of these recent sexual harassment accusations when in reality the good old boys will be sticking around.
Capitalism may improve greatly once we have robot overlord higher-ups that are optimized for economic success only and not power drunk once they don a suit, prove they are a little more cunning and opportunistic than most people that still have fully operating empathetic brain parts, and are, quite frankly often the most idiotic but belligerent (read infantile) people in the room--though of course if some current top-dogs design/get a stake in the business logic of our future corporate AIs I'm sure our mechanized leaders will be just as ruthless and scummy.
I suspect there's a host of tie wearing, sycophantic, despicable wretches out there for every corporate leader to whom one could actually ascribe any virtue or nobility--to one whom you can call leader without having the taste of vomit well up in your mouth.
I'm not sure if that's a problem caused by capitalism or merely exacerbated by it. Chicken/egg sort of thing.
Of course I can only draw upon my limited experience, but I've met very few people in high stakes positions at major companies that I actually liked or even considered intelligent and deserving of the benefits they receive--then again ours is often a system of reward based on raw time spent and bribes offered rather than actual merit. Furthermore, it's an unfortunate fact that valuable qualities are often uncoupled; the person of great intellect may well be a piss poor leader nine times out of ten. Granted, anyone in a higher-up position at a major company has a hell of a lot of stress, responsibility, and pressure on them, but that does not legitimate disgusting behavior as an acceptable outlet, nor does it legitimate chest buffing since effective leadership at major corporation scale often relies on the minor leadership and autonomy of subordinates anyway.
Hierarchies are foolish.