If you're not in today, don't bother coming in tomorrow.

Cheers,

-AI

- Human worker.

two lovers meet up at ones house for Netflix and chill, she takes out her vibrator and he takes his fleshlight. they put them together to let them do what sexual machines do, so now their obligation is fulfilled and they can enjoy conversation instead.

I have been passed over for interviews in a non tech-sector space, because I don't update my linkedin. How is that relevant to anything? What kind of weird policy is that?

    DROP TABLE humans;

Anecdotes are great, aren't they?

Don't belittle someone like you did, you just make yourself the fool.

I'm sorry you've met poor middle managers bit really you didn't get your point across. Like, at all.

However I can see some orthogonal scenario where an "AI" run company - whatever that means in the future - manages a bunch of contracts as a middleman/market maker, thus obviating middle management altogether and making it a world of freelancers.

So it could go that way...

I don't think this can be done sustainably. AI can definitely run a company's operations, especially at scale. A fully AI-run company opens itself up to arbitrage of various sorts.

To manage the work effectively, would require that all assigned tasks can be verified and ranked in quality of work. Otherwise some employees could easily do nothing or a lousy job all day, and just enter into the system that all their work has been done successfully. How would the system know who is slacking? Perhaps if we remove all privacy through computer vision, all kinds of sensors, and massive amounts of data entry. But this would still not be comparable to a manager taking a stroll through the employees and talking to people. I really can't see AI running a company at this time. It requires too much input and still won't be able to make reliable decisions.

Things will get interesting when JIRA improves that development experience...

It surely is. Just look at their new pricing tiers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33244978

This is a solved problem by using surge pricing. It's a widespread practice with contractors today.

I don't know how much automated vs human reasoning figures into how say Instacart or Uber adjust their rates currently. But I think it's reasonable to predict that kind of process becoming self-governing over time. There, AI would exceed managerial performance over time and at scale. It'll still be subject to oversight and guardrails obviously.

This solves the problem for situations where you have a large pool of workers with elastic hours for a job which requires effectively zero training... which is basically Uber, food delivery, and not much else.

Even something as entry-level as a Starbucks barista you can't just pull a random person off the street and expect them to open on their first shift. You really think surge pricing somehow is going to solve shift scheduling problems for flight attendants? Nurses? Operators of specialized heavy machinery at a meat packing plant?

There’s no way I’d have volunteered to go in on my day off at $10/hr, if I was already in the middle of something else. But for $15/hr or $20/hr, I’d be way more amenable than some human asking nicely without any bonus pay.

For doctors or those who already work many hours for high pay, surge pricing doesn’t seem like a great solution though.

In the UK many similar positions use contractors working "zero hour contracts" with no guaranteed hours. In other words "a large pool of workers with elastic hours for a job which requires effectively" net zero training.

> Nurses?

The demographic trends and labor shortages in much of the world I think will be a forcing function to automate and rationalize healthcare to a greater extent than it is now. The only reason I don't think that'll impact quality of care that much is because that quality is degraded today.

> Operators of specialized heavy machinery at a meat packing plant?

Not a factor given labor shortages and automation trends. And even if meat packing plants can't automate, they won't function without underpriced labor or sizable price hikes. Labor shortages are already baked into the demographic cake worldwide starting a few decades from now.

Including for hospitality, which has extremely high rates of attrition, and so while you can't just pull a random person off the street you can often pull a random person with experience from the same or similar chain from a database if you need urgent cover.

Reason I think at least some of those types of companies will make it is that I used to work on CRMs for hospitality, and saw the amount of staff moving back and forth between venues and different companies on our client list.

It won't replace middle management, but it may well reduce the numbers in larger chains.

Offer triple time taken from what otherwise would've been the human manager's pay?

AGI faces an extrapolation gap.

An AGI would be able to solve the problem that currently are being solved by middle management - optimization and decision making in the face of incomplete information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

> Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can.

How will AI know the particular workarounds in the way laborers deal with ad-hoc problems in picking strawberries?

The answer to these questions and questions like them is: they won't. AI cannot deal with problems of physical presence, and the reason that AI will replace white collar workers is not because AI is particularly sophisticated, but because white collar management is particularly dumb.

AI will provide the role that the drinking bird provided for Homer Simpson. The cognitive dissonance in this scenario is believing that either management or white collar roles are advanced, when the opposite is true.

Can that be solved by using something like an error budget?

I can imagine it being a heavy lift to account for measurements and tolerances, especially for "odd"-shaped parts.

I thought it was because Watson was a marketing gimmick to make it seem like they had "AI", when in reality all they had was a bunch of disparate AI-related companies that they'd acquired.

But Watson is a terrible example because it was more about reviving/extending careers of some execs and signalling to share holders and less about AI.

I believe most people intuitively think AGI whenever AI is mentioned. Once we have AGI - still out a few decades I guess - we could replace a lot more than just middle management.

If we’re talking non-AGI AI (for lack of a better term) I don’t see why it’s any different than introducing tools that merely compute faster than a human, just like Excel for example.

Did Excel replace any middle manager? Hello no. It helped them to thrive!

It's not returned in revenue. Nobody has even the faintest idea about what is the effect on non-consolidated services and goods.

ML -- Machine Learning -- The somewhat more modest attempt to name what we are really doing. Ph-antasy D-egree not required but may improve influence. Muddled terminology introduced to sow confusion about what are really just regression and clustering algorithms.

Automating regression and clustering algorithms -- What we are really doing.

AI has already replaced some types of managers, such as most branch managers in banks, who were mostly doing credit worthiness assessments.

Middle management is not going to disappear suddenly, I thin, but rather be thinned out gradually. Manager roles that perform tasks that are easy to automate can over time get fewer responsibilities. For instance, managers in supermarkets may be taken out of the loop for most operational work, such as product placement in shelves, store layout, accounting/budgeting, and with improved AI there can even be automation of tasks such as supervising cleanliness, removal of past-due items, etc. All-in-all, this may cut a job that used to require a full position (and perhaps an assistant on top), to maybe 50% or 30%. This frees up time for the manager to either do other tasks. This can be either regular grocery clerk duties at the same location or it could be that a single manager may manage 2-3 locations.

If Middle Managers were similar they would have been replaced by Excel too, wouldn’t they? Either they aren’t similar or analogy doesn’t work.

Also on the office side in the company, everything is SAP, but why still millions of people push sooo many buttons on the PC, what a waist of time. Not all, but most work on a office is bs work.

I really think it would be possible to automate in office so much. I work in industrie automation and whe I see, what small things we automate, and then how things work in the office. So sad, it's almost fun again.

But as someone who worked on software that handled the last example you gave, I assure, a few well placed if and elses do the trick. Also, humans have tendency to follow any instructions sent to them when it is titled "System" or "Administration".

*System Message:* New revised schedule for. Monday, Feb 31st, 3pm to 11pm. Qualify for overtime. Reply 24h prior to decline.

The more robotic your message sound, the more people are compelled to comply.

Thankfully that is not the case where I live (somewhere in Europe), but I can see what you describe becoming true in a very dystopic future.

Does that AI also handle situations like “boss, would you be so kind to borrow me some money for 2, 3 days? Until the salary comes, that is, cause me and my SO are totally out of it”? Cause some of my former bosses/managers certainly did.

So to answer your question, yes it sure can.

Badly designed automated systems are the life blood of our economy.

Floatpays in the latest YC batch is one of these.

Yes, more bank transactions will cost the business more. That might be something the employee will have to pay for, or it might be something that governments require businesses to eat the cost on.

Can you elaborate?

In the human domain? It's possible, if not probable, that there is no answer. It comes down to interpreting and measuring things that are effectively impossible to quantify, and vary dramatically by group of people. People coming in while not-quite-invisibly growing to loathe you and company morale collapsing is something that you can't put a number on.

And this is just one tiny aspect of all of the different factors that human managers have to deal with constantly.

Really? I tend to not even read them. That might a bad idea, but that's the way my instincts go.

…so no, a few if and else statements will not cut it, in any sense compared to a competent manager.

…but plausibly yes, some kind of ML system could replace that part of the job.

(:

Problems are harder than they look; the whole point is that managers exist because those problems are hard, and they exist now because current approaches (a few if statements is obviously irrelevant, but specifically constraint solvers) to solving them a) take too long to run, b) are too difficult to express dynamically changing problems in and c) lack the “human touch” of favouritism that managers use to doll out rewards and punishments by giving good and bad shifts.

…but, quite plausibly, that work could now be done by a model that takes human speech input and translates it into input for a constraint solver, or even implements a novel constraint solver.

There is novel stuff now, that really does make a difference for this kind of specific domain problem.

It won’t get rid of a shop manager, but it’ll probably make their life easier and mean they can drop having an assistant manager.

Anyway the issue with having an AI or just a regular old program doing things like that is that it will insist on following the rules. So you end up with tricky issues where the system WILL NOT revise the schedule 2 days in advance, because workers are required 7 days notice for instance. Or it can not fill a shift, because there are no one left it can legally call upon.

My wife works in a field that has less unemployment than IT, it is literally impossible to hire extra staff, there simply aren't any. These business also have legally mandate opening hours and a union (not a good one, but it's there). If more than one person call in sick, they technically have a problem, especially for evening shifts, where only one person is at work. You end up with situations where you're legally required to call someone to work, because you need to stay open. You just can't call anyone, because they are already at their maximum number of hours for that week (due to a lack of staff), or you the staff that is available aren't legally allowed to work for the next 11 hours, or the notice would be to short, or you're not able to schedule new off time quickly enough.

In the real world people ignore or bend rules to make things work. Computers don't. The sad reality is that we're surrounded by rules and legislation that are constantly in conflict with each other. It's one of my concerns with self driving cars as well, but to a lesser extend. Some roads are just over used, and with no alternatives, to a point where an AI that insist on keeping a safe distance would reveal that our infrastructure is very poorly laid out. It's just that human brains know and understand how to bend rules to make society work.

Those facilities didn’t even stock up on face masks before Covid, so believe me when I say they know how to run a tight budget.

I would argue that "programming" in essence is first and foremost the task of defining a set of actions or functions you want a computer to perform. This can be highly detailed (like assembly) or quite abstract (like SQL), and with AI you may even end up being able to just use English.

You will still need to check that the output matches your expectations, though.

Additionally when you point out to AI what is wrong, how can you be sure, that AI has fixed the root cause or just made some fixes about that specific appearance of the bug, but it means that bug will pop up somewhere else?

Then again, these things don't need to be all-or-nothing. If you consider GitHub Copilot, and where it can be 10 years from now, I would not be surprised if it can double the productivity of most programmers by something closer to pair programming than a code review process.

Making a case for middle managers isn't done by providing a sequence which can be fully run by a chatbot in practice.

At first, it won't. But eventually, with AIs getting more elaborate and employee databases getting connected, it is not hard to see a scenario where "fired by an AI" becomes a black mark that prevents future employment. Such a black mark would eventually be enough for Jack to follow orders, just for fear of consequences.

Sacrificing pawns is an accepted practice? :)

It will create metrics that will formalize a new paradigm. You know that arbitrary number in your bank account that defines you, that number on your report card, that rating on an Amazon review, that number that’s defining global inflation, that metric that measures interest rate, that number of hours you work …

The fucking lines of code, number of commits, points on a story, that SAT score, that rate people’s look if they are closer to a 5 or a 10 in beauty. Earnings per share, market cap, valuation.

Your age. AI will make so many bullshit metrics that I doubt society will know how to cope with it.

And management will use it, and you will be scared shitless and adapt. Or worse, you will dysfunctionally be unable to cope with the adaptation and be depressed.

“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”

^ Just replace IBM with AI metrics, and that will be the miserable life people will live out.

On the flip side, the companies that embodied this ethos were disrupted out of existence over the course of decades, to the point where IBM ran out of customers and sold off their declining hardware business.

Any damage this does in the short-term will self correct in 30 years.

Like all the people that slaved during Industrialization without workers protection or quality of life fixes, or all the millions that died in WW1/2 because we couldn’t understand what a world war actually was.

There will be a lost generation to Ai, we simply can’t see it because right now it makes digital art from funny text prompts.

Attempting to solve really hairy problems with a simple, universally applicable solution is a tale as old as time.

[1] Although I suspect a sea of AI-generated bullshit metrics would be closer in impact to outsourcing/insourcing cycles or whatever the hell we've allowed HR to become than WW2.

As someone who works in an international environment and routinely taveles between sites run by international conglomerates workers in Europe for example are not better protected than workers in the US, they've simply ceded more control to government.

The real difference between European and US workers is in sheer productivity. Sure, Americans work more hours but they also get more done in those hours. The difference in regulatory and cultural overheads is significant.

I come to that at this end.

I will start by giving the at-will contract example of poor US worker protection. Those at-will contract are not contracts. They describe in great lengths that you don't have any relationship with your employer. No string attach! Great, I wonder who benefit more from it?

That has deep consequences, and the result is when I work in the US i feel a Damocles sword upon me, while in Europe I feel deeply secure. ( for the

The why comes down to those questions.

- Can you be fired without cause and not get compensated?

- What is your level of compensation if you do get fired ( with or without cause)? For how long?

- Does your employers have to contribute to your retirement funds?

- What happen to your retirement fund if the economy goes to shit? Where was the money all along?

- What are your recourse in case of a disagreement with your employers? Can you realistically exercise those resources on a tie budget and limited time ( eg: single mother working full time for minimal wage )

---

The fun part :

> Sure, Americans work more hours but they also get more done in those hours.

No.

Pretty sure you are mislead. From memory the most productive place on earth is some western European country like Luxembourg or Belgium. They work less but produce a similar output of GDP.

Let me find a source on that.

Yeah. GPD per hour: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-prod...

The US is just behind France. In 8th position.

French workers contribute $79.70 to the GDP (PPP) per hour worked. France’s workweeks are the fifth-shortest among OECD countries at 38.9 hours. France’s productivity is about 25% higher than the OECD average and EU averages.

While

US workers contribute $79.60 to the GDP. American full-time employees work 41.5 hours per week, and about 11.1% of employees work over 50 hours per week.

So, that for productivity, seems comparable in term of GDP. But then ...

A macdonald worker has 5 week vacation / years, per law in France. That's a starting point.

The work week is 35h/week, per law. ( people work 40h, but they get 5h/week of extra vacation on top of the mandatory 5 weeks )

So, to build on that example, French work less but the holy-GDP per hour worked is slightly better than the US.

And they get slightly more respect show to them in the form of predictable, enforceable and protective contracts.

I don't know what's wrong with the US. I looks like diminishing return on pressuring your worker into more work?

France and western Europe in general have comprehensive social nets that will allow a larger part of the population to be idle/unemployed. A GDP per capita will be lower for all those places.

I think we don't really care if a country is deciding to support non-productive citizen. Here, we want to compare the productivity of people who do work. And that the 'per hour' metric I choose for that.

Looking at the 'per capita' ranking, you see a lot of tax haven like cayman islands, Bermuda or Macau that are weeded out in the per hours view.

Oh, Purchasing Power Parity. I see.

Well, I disagree here but that out of my depth. I think without adjustment those metrics would measure how your currency is faring on the currency market. Not the house you can buy, the food you can put on the table and so on.

But I see your point, if we talk about productivity, we should compare Apple to Apple and not "Adjusted Apple" to "Apple".

It also depends who is seen as the repository for this productivity. The worker? Or the economy.

If it's the later we should talk in USD with a date on it. I agree.

If it's the worker, well, I care about what I can buy with the money deposited in my bank account, not what I could buy if I was living in Hungary or Japan. Then PPP make sense. It's also common practice in statistic to harmonize your data in order to make meaningful comparison.

Last thing on your last comment, I really think the GDP per capita make little sense here. Labour input is defined as total hours worked of all persons engaged in production. A GDP per capita is not measuring that.

> the GDP output per capita is about 50% greater

Let find the same thing per hours worked, without PPP adjustment.

Well, PPP is apply to every data I found. But this more recent trend might make you feel better. On 2010-USD + PPP, france went to 102 while the US is at 107. ( On the 2017-2021 period )

https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm

---

Here is my anecdotal and personal experience. I spend half of my life in France, and the other in the US. Quality of life is comparable. French works less. Their country is not crumbling. Heck, it's in pretty good shape infra-wise. They have billionaire and large mega corporations as well if that's a metrics. I pay similar taxes here and there.

Maybe french are annoying enough to get away with it? Maybe they are living on credit. Idk. But also maybe the US worker are being abused and stretch tin for diminishing returns. Is that worth it for such a slim difference?

Let’s take the fictional example of a team of builder building a house. The exact same, basic house.

The same team of people, build 3 houses One in the Silicon Valley somewhere full of rich tech folks that they are gonna overcharge.

One other in Columbia ( same exact house )

One other in Germany ( Same exact house, built in 2000 man hours all 3 of them )

The productivity of that fictional team of builder is the same. They output one single house in 2000 man hours.

But they might sell the house for 10 times more USD in the SV than in Columbia and 5 more than Germany.

Skewing the measure of their raw productivity.

Hope it makes sense

There is no logic to madness, but there certainly is to stupidity. It is rigid and predictable.

The key point you fail to grasp is that this isn't going to be a stripping back but rather a consentration of power and focus around those you vilify. There will be less transparency and fewer chances for humanity to intervene on its behalf.

Meanwhile society is fundamentally built on exchange and community. Strictly antisocial structures like the one you described are doomed to fail because if you set aside the majority, you become a minority trend.

That’s in a way the paradox at the heart of modern capitalism. A system which alienates everyone expect a few is a dead system.

maybe we are saying the same thing, and I absolutely agree that Americans have a fundamentally individualist viewpoint.

however I still see your argument as being rooting in human perspective. capitalism is a human institution as much as our human body is a cellular institution. apoptosis is as fundamental to a functioning human body as exploitative labor relations are to capital.

I don't see it as submissive because in a control society, governed by computers and machine learning models, humans are in fact freed in a certain way, channeled toward production. this is coupled with ideology which is already present to make it feel less alienating, even preferable.

however capital is far from dead. and whatever human individual or institutional churning happens in the next 30 years due to tech I don't see having a significant impact.

1. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-posts...

That’s the first step.

That is to say, you become a super-human; someone who cannt be financially pressured into serfdom.

The AI panopticon, once it is unleashed, will scan your mind, read all your thoughts, and extract all your emotions and goals. Only the wealty will be able to afford freedom ftom the panopticon.

Coding tomorrow's dystopia - today!

but i think in general you are correct, but in reality i suspect many (but not all) managers dont actually provide any value, some even provide negative value

I think the article argues that AI is more likely to be better than a human at replacing certain management problems, than at doing other classes of labor.

I don't think the article argues that AI is better than humans, just that it's possible/likely to be better at humans at middle management tasks before other tasks.

Unsure if I buy the argument, but it is indeed a cool hypothesis to explore. Cool premise to build upon and think of how the world would look like if it comes true (second half of the article).

Not better. Cheaper.

"Better" is just marketing.

If you consider a job as exploitation, in the free world you can find another job, right? That is what I do: I will not work in what I think it is bad.

But in my case at least that job should be very bad by all measures, bc there is no worst thing for me than getting social benefits just because a job was "too bad", "too exploited" or "too hard".

All in all, I do not think driving taxis has something to do with exploitation.

Because measuring how people feel on a day to day is considered too subjective and probably will always be superfluous metric in the algorithm. In other words, we don’t care (clearly ironic, while discussing empathy).

That’s why we have one of the most bullshit metrics to define happiness, customer and boss satisfaction. You as a worker better find a way to extract your own happiness from those two branches of “success”.

Mass scale misery is the thing that’s not being pumped into the function, it’s simply not a variable we account for.

Is it so hard to believe that the necessity to constantly incentivize and constantly measure via profit is actually contributing to misery? That, we as humans can no longer naturally do something?

The boss is another role. You can be a boss. Why not?

Ah, it entails risks also: paying bills, managing, taking decisions, risk of going bankrupt... so when most people talk about expoitation they do not talk about the other side of things so that their complaints look legit.

Also, working in an already setup environment usually multiplies your productivity. But if it is not the case, then the natural consequence is that copying the business model and starting to compete should be an easy alternative. If people complain and do not do it, there are more reasons they are not talking about.

For sure there will be bad bosses, and bad employees, do not misunderstand this.

But if it is so bad and exploited you have other options: become the boss, switch job. If you do not want either of those, you should wonder why, not starting to insult people who give you the possibility to improve your life conditions or survive. Out of mutual interest, of course. Not bc they are saints.

It is very funny when I see people talking about how they are exploited by others and instead of finding an alternative, like taking the risk to invest their accumulated wealth, they just come with this discourse.

Remember that if you are an employee you can just switch jobs also, you can do something else, you can try to build something your own. What you cannot do is go with that discourse assuming the other part does not pay any cost: for example, when there is an investment, you have to spend a bunch of money for something that is likely (most business do) to fail, putting your money in advance. The people who work just work, leave and find something else.

Think of it. You are at home. Jump to the bed, do nothing. You die. Poor is the natural condition of the man. That is obvious.

Now think: if you must be provided something, and you do not work for it (I assume in conditions working by mutual agreement) you are just reversing things: the one who won't work is the one demanding and exploiting others' work in fact to live from them. There is no such thing as an exploiting salary. There is just someone offering something and you can either take it or leave it. Bc if they pay u what u demand (did u ever see someone complain saying "my salary is too high?") probably the business cannot exist bc pol dnt use it for a higher cost. And if u work for them it is bc it is ur best alternative at the time.

So saying that not being payed enough is exploiting is totally absurd in free conditions. First, because you can find alternatives and second, because if I pay you something for your work (bc I give u support for getting customers, for example, with trchnology) you can leave it, take it, or build an alterbative. What you cannot do is to insult them just bc you want a bigger part and that generates a frustration feeling for you bc of your feeling of unjust. But if some people do it it is clearly bc it is their best alternative. I do not want to steal the food of those ppl. Whwn they find something better they will move on and customers have a service.

Something is done voluntary doesn't automatically means it is legal or ethical.

Isn't that good for the driver?

As a rule, isn't that beneficial for drivers? Why are you talking like if it is inherently bad? Is there something that doesn't fit my description?

If you have results that actually are better scheduling than done by a human, with plausible explanations that most people affected agree with, you might be able to replace managers.

What scares me, is that we would be training the second AI to convince us to believe it, rather than training it to tell the truth.

I think this would raise a lot of doubts as it could be biased and have an excuse to say: oh, this is the next thing to do...

I do not think humans, nowadays, assume as natural that a machine dictates what to do. For information support it is ok. But not for taking decisions.

How does google convince you to provide a “backup” phone number? Or that its search results and recommendations are correct? Or that you align with PlayStore’s rules to not be banned?

Don’t people wish something else? If it is not better than a fellow human, why don’t we have other, humane services dominating the market?

The idea of AI getting better than a fellow human is flawed at the definition itself. Instead of focusing of AI being generally better than a fellow human we should look at how AI gets better at specific tasks to start with and then go from one task to another making it more "intelligent/better".

This is already happening since industrial revolution freeing up humanity's bandwidth from the mundane tasks, so nothing new when it comes for managerial level tasks.

That said I think AI/automation will still be involved, instead I imagine it'll be like what we already see with support/call centers:

All the routine easy to manage items get sent to automation, while the complicated issues actually go through to a human.

Simple: fire the ones who don't obey orders, while the parent firm lobbies for elevated unemployment rates to discipline workers.