How hard will the robots make us work?

theverge.com

8 points·liroyleshed··4 comments

As an industry we have to start imbuing algorithms that directly impact humans with intrinsic "cushions" of some sort. Windows of forgiveness - windows in time, in space, in metrics. Avenues for handling situations that fall outside of the normal way things are expected to go. Squishy, sympathetic outer shells.

People are not modules to be perfectly-fitted to a slot. It's the same idea behind giving a tightly-engineered utility a tolerant, helpful, not-clean user interface: the I/O barrier between a human and a machine cannot be as rigid as that between two pieces of code.

I wonder if this idea could be formalized into a set of best-practices.

Another option would be to create legal precedents for more directly establishing cause-effect links between how a management system behaves and harm caused to employees. This allows for the compassion of the system to be quantified in dollars and weighed against exploitative practices to optimize profit. No for profit organization will choose to loose possible competitive advantages for the sake of treating people well. The best way to prevent a race to the bottom is to make it prohibively expensive.

In my experience business leaders don't care without an incentive, and legislators don't care to make said incentives. Unfortunately the engineers on the ground seem to be the only ones with any compassion left in many cases. If we can do something, which we can, then we need to.

I nominate "How hard will the robots make us work?" as headline of the year -- even though it's just February.

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