When the algorithm is your boss
tribunemag.co.uk
tribunemag.co.uk
The Reddit r/antiwork has been getting traction (even with the Fox News debacle) and I'm seeing more and more people talk about wage inequality amongst a lot more social classes than I have in the past decade. Fingers crossed history arcs towards economic equality.
It's happening now. Specialists around me can't find an affordable house even with their relatively high salary unless their parents can help with their initial deposits for a mortgage and ,at least for my country, it's looking to get worse with no capital gains tax :^)
I know that the only reason I left my hometown is because of higher paying jobs in other cities/countries. If I could make what I make here, while living there, I would probably go back so I could be closer to my family, plus have my taxes help my hometown and country, instead of some other country.
* You, as a native English speaker, familiar with American business culture and someone with years of experience in the field are always going to be paid an order of magnitude more than someone just learning the ropes.
* You can, if you want, outsource your tasks to other people wherever you are.
* You understand that this luck, this privilege, is not going to last forever, because ultimately these jobs will equalize out around the world. And it's right and fair that they should. So you take the advantage you have now and you parlay it into securing something for your future.
The inequality between an American who can live like a king on $200k a year working remotely in a village in Brazil, and a local kid who's learning Javascript there and making $1k a month, is going to even itself out. And that's a good thing for efficiency, equality, and the global economy as a whole. All you have to do is be on the right side of it, ride the wave while it lasts, pass on some knowledge, and by the time they're fantastic at taking your job over you'll be 20 years ahead all over again. There's no reason to feel insecure or guilty about it. The global south is not behind America because America is trying to restrict education there. America does plenty of damage to its own educational system, but it needs skilled workers abroad. The global south is behind America because it hasn't fully shifted from economies of community to economies of scale. That's a multi-generational change. Not to be blunt, but it's plenty of time to become an owner rather than a worker.
But the algorithms are already compensating for that. Many companies are paying “location differential” salaries. It will probably result in a new form of outsourcing.
The “good” news, however, is that it won’t last. Many formerly affordable areas are already seeing gentrification and median income jumps, as a result, so they are being flooded with yuppies, and driving out the lifelong residents. I’m watching that happen to Brooklyn, in New York. I know that it is almost catastrophic, in San Francisco. I’ve seen the “Google buses,” on 101.
I’m hoping that unions make a comeback, but that’s a damoclean sword; as the American system is highly adversarial, and can be corrupted fairly easily.
It’s also becoming almost impossible to get jobs, unless you jump through crazy hoops, and don’t get me started on the silly whiteboard tests. It’s resulting in things like “leetcode bootcamps,” and consultants, that will help you to “optimize” your CV for scanning algos.
Background checks are almost certain to find something wrong; especially in this age of social media. I remember, a few years ago, when a teacher was fired, because she posted a Facebook picture of herself on vacation, with a drink in her hand[0], and there’s a prominent Canadian psychologist, permanently barred from the US, because he wrote an article, where he mentioned taking LSD, while in college, in the 1960s[1].
Also, politicians almost always have something in their past, that can be used in “oppo research.”
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1354515/Teacher-sac...
so, combined services for remote workers -
maintain fake address in high cost of living area, providing phone service with rerouting of calls to your real number, providing vpn service so you have an ip address from that high cost of living area.
You don't believe success is a combination of nature and nurture?
You're going to have to elaborate on that, because AFAIK humanity has not solved intelligence to the point that we can say it is entirely nurture. That makes it reasonable to assume that it is part nature, which means that yes. It is genetically better than others' brains. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Just for some context, the median personal income is $36k, while the median software engineer makes $110k. There are about 1.8 million of us. So by each sending back (to our employers or the Treasury) $74k, we could reduce wage inequality by $133 billion. Not too shabby!
In the US.
I thought that pensions are more common, as a matter of fact. You almost have to be a government employee to have a pension these days, in the US.
There are about 130 million full time workers in the US. Multiplying that by $36K, which is obviously wrong, but I believe gives an order of magnitude at least, is nearly $5 trillion.
$133 billion would then be a couple or three percent. Which would be good for one year's cost of living increase. Better than nothing.
I'm not endorsing your math, just taking it as given, and please don't take mine too seriously.
The way to reign in employer exploitation is by improving the bargaining position and political power of workers (via laws and unions). Taking a voluntary pay cut is as effective as voluntarily paying a higher tax rate if you believe taxes are too low.
Here's an example of how to improve working conditions - see if it includes any workers taking a voluntary pay cut to reduce inequality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603398
So no, I don't take steps to "reduce my wages" towards the median. But I do make donations to people who are trying to improve the status quo, and I do support unions and other efforts at real power-rebalancing, even if they mean a pay cut for myself one day, because that would be for the sake of an actual positive impact.
Inequality is a very weird frame for the well-being of a society or its less fortunate. The absurdity of sending back your paycheck being an “improvement” is just one element. We can have rising living standards across the board & call it a catastrophe because those at the top are rising faster. Or we can have a collapse, and say that your schadenfreude at your neighbor’s demise makes you whole. The whole model is absurd.
Not to mention the carelessness between income and wealth. Moving income from high wage earners to the portfolios of shareholders is actually good for income and wage equality. It amplifies wealth inequality, but that gets a lot less play since we mainly tax wages.
The professional-managerial class do wield considerably more power than the working class. I don't think that's because they have money, though. I think it's because the state is a large organization. People with the skills to run a state will rarely want for white-collar employment. People who influence bureaucracies for a living will also be pretty good at getting what they want from the state.
Imagine. Who's going to win a national electoral campaign, who couldn't land a job in marketing?
"See, if you simply choose to send back half your salary to me there'll be less income-inequality between you and the janitor! Please ignore my golden throne."
There is only one possible outcome where everybody wins and that is capitalism becomes so incredibly good at eliminating inefficiencies that all possible work is automated away, leading to the collapse of capitalism itself since it depends on continuous consumption which depends on disposable income which won't exist because there are no jobs.
I'd really like to believe this is the point where the world evolves into post scarcity where there is no economy because there is enough for everybody and no need to economize anything. Realistically, the corporations will most likely literally invent new economies out of thin air based on nothing just like they did when they conjured up nonsense like copyright.
All scarcity problems since 50 or even 100 years ago are artificial self inflicted constructs.
We are post-scarcity the moment we simply decide to be.
The reason we haven't and wont any time soon is property rights and everyone who has anything to lose in any redistribution or any change to future distribution.
It wasn't that long ago that 30% of children died before age 1. Imagine having a baby and there is a 30% chance it is dead in a year? That is almost all of human history.
The complaint will remain constant no matter what. If everyone owned a BMW some people would complain there is this aristocratic class that has a 7 series while the peasants all own 3 series and that we need to make things more equal.
We are so equal that the richest man in history and a homeless person practically have the same smart phone.
A computer or “algorithm” doesn’t decide goals and values on its own.
The computer executes an algorithm that efficiently implements the values of decisions of the people in charge of developing and deploying the software (and their bosses).
Businesses have done a great job of laundering controversial and sometimes illegal decisions through “algorithms” as though they were some kind of independent entity.
There are other domains where analogous conversations should be had. Many people agree with their laws in the general and even specific senses, but almost nobody would want to live in a society where all the laws are enforced perfectly 100% of the time. Occasional lawbreaking is necessary for society to function. Anybody who objects to this should really think through what they're wishing for.
Its true that somewhere behind the scenes is a set of people making the algorithm and a set of people implementing it, but for the end user/worker there is no human, no realistic arbitration, no negotiation, no favors, no coworkers, no smiles, no understanding, and no recourse. It reminds me of yesterday’s “Did I just lose $500k?” post. When S got fired it may as well have been mandated by god.
ADDENDUM: I don't want to toot our horn too much, but also remember that as a member of this forum you are probably an order of magnitude better at navigating complex institutions, understanding business objectives, understanding the “intent” if a piece of algorithmic technology, and advocating for yourself than the average person who picks up gig work. To many people it is literally magic, and the further your boss is toward being magical the closer you are to being a slave to them. And I don't think I am being melodramatic with my choice of words.
As weird as this probably sounds, I gave many of the scripts silly names and a couple of them pretend "personalities" (ie error messages/prompts will be phrased as if there's an imaginary character inside the machine).
To call software a scapegoat or "not their boss" seems a bit disingenuous. Each algorithm or script has its own goals, its own quirks and its own strengths and weaknesses, just like a human manager. Sometimes these quirks or misaligned goals lead to good people getting fired, just like with a human manager. These algorithms also replaceable and retrainable by the top-level brass, again just like a human manager.
To me, what seems wrong is not that machines are making decisions, but that there is no appeals process for the people who've had their lives ruined by such a decision.
So true. Not everybody is going to see through the smoke and mirrors.
Too much carbon/water/energy use = restraints on your usage. (No restraints if you can pay though.) This is what smart meters, smart phones, smart cities are going to facilitate. (Smart = Spy)
If I agreed with their evaluations and was able to choose to opt in, I might even consider this. But this is not the plan. What will really happen is that the political and billionaire classes will find that it is right for them to assume the role of determining the technocratic goals that the AI driven system should achieve.
We will find that we have a tyrant computer to engage with. There won't be a friendly face to help you by bending the rules in some way. It will be like when you ring up your local governance office to sort something out... but worse. We are not going to be stepping into techno-utopia, that's for sure.
A bio-medical-security-id seems to be a required first step.
‘They’ have power and money because ‘we’ give it to them. Not because they take it from us.
When you have a monopoly on violence (because you effectively own the government), you have a disproportionately large say about who gets what.
The idea that somehow you can have a revolution when the other side has machineguns and all you have is a beer gut and maybe a double-barrel shotgun is naive at best.
Under testing, everyone seems to be pretty bad at recognizing liars [2]. It’s especially hard to get good because it’s often an open loop, since good liars are never caught at all (classic toupee fallacy — you think you’re good at catching liars because you don’t know about the ones you missed), you never really get the chance to calibrate.
[1]: maybe with specific definitions of “average” and a very lopsided distribution, but I’m doubting that the people who think they have exceptional judges of character actually believe that they are above the mean but near the mode; usually, if someone is “exceptional,” I assume they’re in a high percentile
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/03/how-to-s... — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26607386
Such decisions are value-driven, and cannot be replaced by an algorithm. That’s what we have politics for.
The main difference is that business organizations tend to be more authoritative, but that already changes towards more balanced organizations that actually debate on their values.
I hope here in EU this bleak future is delayed a bit, heard rumors that EU Parl has a series of legal initiatives to fight against.
With complicated algorithms it may not be obvious, but then you can try to poke the black box with thousands of sample cases to see how it reacts.
Compare this with humans, who often don’t even know themselves what their decisions are really based on.
Shame and empathy are built in because we really do work better in at least small groups of up to perhaps a few hundred people.
> All the while, the potential for discrimination based on race, gender, or disability, especially in hiring and firing software, remains obscured behind the black box of AI.
Only the company itself is actually in practice going to be testing their system but they only do so with a view to their own interests.
I think the GDPR legislation already takes small steps to this direction.
Like, even if the dismissal was after a warning, because of rules well known in advance and with an accurate explanation, GDPR would still prohibit making this decision solely through automated processing, there has to be a place for human intervention.
Article 22 even acknowledges this to some extent, making an explicit exception for people who have some other kind of contract (including employment) and for which the law has defined suitable safeguards. U.S. employment legislation is indeed not a sufficient safeguard, but the fact that it insufficiently protects privacy is somewhat of an understatement.
You'd have to have access to it. This is highly unlikely. If testing as a black box, could they identify a test and change its behavior, like VW emissions tests?
I would have disagreed 2 years ago but got a new boss last year that seems to make huge business decisions based on a random number generator.
For personal reasons I had to dive into NPD, BPD and psychopaths (all cluster B personality disorders) the last years. Once I finally understood that sh1t, a whole lot of other stuff made sense. What big tech is doing here is using these same principles on a world wide scale. I'm not saying this is new, because the Romans with their 'divide and conquer' did basically the same.
The solutions to counteract this as an individual are also the same as found in the psychology books: go 'no contact', or at least 'gray rock'. If you are capable, that is. There's going to be a lot of casualties, and I feel for the workers there (or should I say 'victims').
What you describe sounds pretty BPD, especially with the black/white thinking (although I think hot/cold is clearer wording). I was more thinking along sinister lines here.
And indeed, zero regard for different points of view. Which is very logical when one finally understands that: if you are - in your own mind - the god of the universe and beyond, every other view is by definition beneath you.
Ha, you wish but it won't happen. We will just divide ourselves in a new way. Which algorithm to use.
The current version of this is "Computer says no", with humans reduced to being meat-based I/O devices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUQgthIs7pM
This is so much more cost-effective than slavery.
But not today. Because AI is not at the level where it makes mistakes at the same rate as humans. AI is better at chess and maybe driving cars, but it's not yet better at critical thinking, empathy, and solving open-ended problems like "how should we address this employee's performance?" Not necessarily because it can't be better, but it isn't yet at that level. Even if Amazon actually tried to make their AI bosses lenient, without some human holding the final decision or appeal, there will be blatant mistakes like the ones the article describes.