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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

What does chess have in common with retail middle management? As someone who has managed a retail store and played chess, I can confidently answer: nothing.

Remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy? And then IBM saturated the airwaves with ads about how Watson was going to revolutionize industries like energy and health care? Notice how we don’t see those ads anymore? It’s because winning Jeopardy has nothing to do with providing health care and energy. Like chess, it’s an artificially constrained game with a clearly defined goal. Whereas business is unconstrained and nobody knows what will succeed over time.

The hardest thing about management is managing people, who are generally self-centered, opinionated, and wishing they were doing something else. How, specifically, will AI be better at that than humans? AI cannot even reliably autocorrect this comment as I’m typing it. How is it going to convince Jack to switch his shift and come in to cover open on Sunday because Jill’s sister was in a car accident and Jill is watching her niece? How’s AI going to do that better than a fellow human?

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How’s AI going to do that better than a fellow human?

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.

This. I wonder if people will react to this the same they do when human-made metrics don't make any sense.

>“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”

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.

Sure, but if you measure 30 years, let’s say starting at 20 for a young adult - that all the way until they are 50 they will have to deal with this. We as a society are basically saying at least one generation of people are a lost generation.

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.

Not saying you're wrong[1], but if it weren't AI it'd be something else.

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.

I don't know for the US worker, they seems to be able to take any abuse and ask for more free market in their ass. But that stuff would not fly in places where workers have some leverage and can influence policies. ( Or let's be more real : influence policies roll-out and eventually stopping them for a few years )

Citations needed.

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.

> Citations needed

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?

The PPP adjustment is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Real (non-PPP adjusted) GDP per capita in the US is ~50% higher than France's.

Correct. In the context of productivity, I think a 'per hour' metric is more appropriate.

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.

Yes, but even your "per hour" metric is massively distorted by being adjusted for PPP (i.e. local cost of living, etc. which is somewhat subjective and why you'll find drastically different indexes for PPP from different sources. Even if it could be reliably measured it's still different then a measure of raw production). The average American only works ~7% more hours per week than the average Frenchman, but the GDP output per capita (without adjusting for PPP) is about 50% greater, which means American GDP per hour worked is way higher than French GDP per hour worked.

Sorry you lost me there. Can you point that out in the numbers? Also I realised that I don't understand what you mean by PPP adjusted. I thought we were talking about adjusting GDP per capita vs per hours.

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?

Actually I gave it some thought. PPP makes sense and that what should be used.

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

I don't think there's a 'will' about it... the people who grew up with social media at every age already have a mental health crisis that society wasn't prepared for.

Nothing human makes it out of the near future. Can what’s playing you make it to level two?

Agreed. I think people warning of an esoteric singularity AI will be wrong. It won't even be called an AI perhaps, it will be little agents that try to quantify everything. Data analysts as prostitutes of special interest will set up metrics so that management can nudge workers towards a certain direction. In the vast majority of cases it will be metrics to quantify individual productivity. This then becomes a new religion. People like the idea of being able to reduce complexity of anything down to a number and what they want to believe will become reality to them.

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

Competition is going to love predictable competitors.

We see how this plays out already in search: you need a surprisingly large human staff to manage the adversarial side. If "the algorithm" is predictably gameable, then malicious actors will take the value; so it needs to be constantly adjusted to keep ahead of them.

Yeah, but they also like price fixing and exploitation. Look at the transport industry how it implemented surveillance. One participant extracted more from their employees by putting them on a tighter schedule so that taking a leak became something relevant. Others have to adjust to these measures.

On how many established industries can you wake up tomorrow and start a competing company?

Part of the archetypal vampire trope was that peasants would carry grains of wheat or barley in their pocket, so that if they were being pursued by vampires, they could throw down the grains of wheat, and the vampire would be transfixed and obsessively start trying to count the grains, allowing the peasant to escape.

We don’t have to blame AI for metrics that do not include comfort and job satisfaction. The effects you described are not inherent to AI but to goals that upper people impose on lower people through a pyramid of management. Everyone there cares about profits and efficiency, nobody gives a fuck about workers living on the edge. Maybe stripping this paradigm naked is a good thing and a way to something else.

You've reduced a large swath of humanity to propaganda talking points.

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.

I’m aware of this point, but I don’t believe that our traditional system is based on a personal desire to make someone suffer. You see those in power as all-knowing all-controlling evil beings. I see them as the best at flimsily balancing on a shitty system that is built-in/inherent to humans. Only non-human rule can change it, imo, similar to how chess, go and starcraft bots can change how the game is played. Maybe your prediction is correct, but chances that we can master business “ourselves” to optimize it for human comfort and dignity are basically zero.

I’m always amused by these takes because they are implicitly submissive. It only makes sense if you posit the world as some kind of omnipotent power structure imposing things on an other powerless strata. I think Americans are drawn to these ideas because they have a somewhat individualistic culture.

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.

Deleuze has a good really short essay called Postscript on Societies of Control[1] on the machinic nature of capitalism.

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...

Except that most of the time you won't even know what metrics it is making judgements on, and neither will most of the people who made the model

That is why you must get rich with crypto or startups before the AI panopticon comes for you. Become who you are. Free yourself from capitalism.

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.

> What does chess have in common with retail middle management?

Sacrificing pawns is an accepted practice? :)

also, play a castling on the board to protect the king|ceo (in German we actually use the word 'rochade'=castling commonly for lateral movements in management and politics)

Hello Human,

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

Cheers,

-AI

- Human worker.

reminds me of that joke Zizek likes to make about dating.

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.

That's a sad commentary on relationships.

Maybe you should watch the video to appreciate the full meaning of Zizek's idea.

And by "enjoy conversation instead" you of course mean, "stare at their phones and ignore each other".

woohoo, 4 day weekend!

aw no! Now I have to go update my LinkedIn profile!

Hey, but for real, what is with the obsession that some employers have with linkedin?

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?

Hello computer,

    DROP TABLE humans;

Somehow I feel this would have terrible consequences.

"I don't know WHAT you're talking about, meatbag, I just wanna kill all humans." - Bender

That is neither artificial nor intelligence.

Are middle managers either?

People love to shit on middle managers, but I can say all the ones I worked under (as a SWE, at the one company) were all smarter and more experienced than I was, and I really appreciated the mentorship.

Great. Mine asked their employees how they could help with tasks they knew 0 about, try to solve technical and political issues by playing team therapist, and couldn't even read the Scrum guide deep enough to know what is and isn't part of it.

Anecdotes are great, aren't they?

Anecdotes are crucial for they are the bed of experience.

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.

This is definitely how the Butlerian Jihad started.

Watson was a stunt. It's not very hard for someone on HN to figure out how much of Watson was Watson. The crowd still bought it.

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.

> 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.

I can imagine it can be a fintech opportunity. An AI that automatically performs a credit check behind the scene and lend you the money in advance, probably money in your account in seconds. It's not too hard actually.

Why the hell would you perform a credit check if someone who works for you needs some of their salary two days early? Would you stop paying their salary if the credit check came back negative? Of course that seems like exactly the pointless and counterproductive behavior one would expect from a badly designed automated system.

> .. the pointless and counterproductive behavior one would expect from a badly designed automated system.

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

This is different from a pay day loan how exactly? I have bank app on my phone which claims that I can get an up to 35k loan in minutes

You’re describing an interest bearing loan. This is more like being able to withdraw money that you already earned, you just don’t have it because it’s not the 25th of the month yet.

Floatpays in the latest YC batch is one of these.

There are several providers which offers salary linked loans and advances already, and one of the benefits is that when it's an advance on your salary there's no need to credit check the employee because it's the company which will pay it back when your salary is due.

I can imagine something a lot simpler: ask employees the cadence at which they want to be paid out (daily, weekly, bimonthly, monthly) as allowed by law and pay them that way.

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.

While I was still working there, a vendor had approached us with a service that allow employees to get a pay advance. No fees if it's 2 to 3 days ahead. I can't for the life of me remember their name. But it's basically a debit card you get where your estimated pay is deposited earlier. And they have an api we can integrate with.

So to answer your question, yes it sure can.

>Watson was a stunt. It's not very hard for someone on HN to figure out how much of Watson was Watson.

Can you elaborate?

Waston isn't so much an early general chess ai than a program aided by programmers/other gms to beat a very specific style of chess that the previous world champion played in a limited number of games

I think that you're mixing up Watson the jeopardy bot with Deep Blue the chess bot.

No, he's reasoning by analogy. Read it as "Watson isn't so much a general trivia AI", etc.

> Also, humans have tendency to follow any instructions sent to them when it is titled "System" or "Administration".

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

I don’t know what problem you were solving, but irony is that optimal constraint based scheduling is an NP hard problem, that is usually solved using heuristics that an AI could actually do a very good job at.

…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.

I think you need to reverse the "Reply" so it's "Reply to accept".

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.

Which field is that? I thought healthcare but it must not be it because you said there was only one person at the evening shift.

Can still possibly be healthcare. Even on a floor with 20+ patients, you only need one RN and one CNA on the floor (I’ve seen skeleton crews like that).

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.

Technically not healthcare, but close: Pharmacy. That being said, my sisters a nurse and she's frequently the only one for a ward during the nightshifts. In case of emergencies she'd need to call on staff from other wards.

Humanity is shaped by its tools much more than the other way around.

I worked for the Watson group. It was largely a marketing play which did land with some enterprises but is ultimately a failure because the tech was not there.

You are right and this is bad news, because AI middle management is still inevitable. Currenlty, AI more or less manages taxi drivers in different places around the world, also telesupport personnel and other positions like those. Every time it degrades to orwellian level of sick incentives and pure exploitation. And things will get worse, because it allows to maximize profits.

So from your writing I can extract: profit is bad and incentives to work are bad, no matter the improvement on the service or if people do it bc they found it an option?

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.

the boss makes more off your work than you do, that's what people mean by exploitation when they're talking about work.

I know what they mean, and it is an incorrect assessment with a great bias towards their own interests.

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.

Interesting, you only cover the options that exist in the current paradigm around a advanced economy where there are plenty of individual options that you are right most people don't explore. The weakness from my perspective in your argument is that the current economic structure you are describing and which we are living in, is by its very nature exploitative. It has deep historical roots in destroying any other means of sustenance beyond what the system controlled. Cultivatable land was stolen, captured and monopolized at the expense of those relying on those sytems. Means of sustenance have been continually destroyed or over exploited such as the buffalo in the States, the swamps drained and turned to farmland everywhere, seasonal water sources captured and guarded everywhere, jungles burned or cut down through out Asia and South America. This direct exploitation of communal resources by groups of people against other groups of for economic gain and control has forced people who did choose a different form of life is directly exploitative. This led to Nomads everywhere given "incentives" everywhere to settle down and become part of the larger economic system and culture, native american boarding houses in both US and CA that led to the mass deaths of thousands of Native children. This has led to loss of culture, languages, and peoples all over the world. When the larger system doesn't approve the smaller systems disappear. Yes we have options in the current economic system but we have no options outside of it.

Your argument that the system exploits is dead easy to drop.

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, negotiate 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.

I am talking about concrete examples and consequent trend. Uber is fiddling with price hikes and "high demand areas" to make drivers work more. Yandex.Taxi in Russia gives drivers "let's go home" button to catch a ride towards their home, but before driver hits that button Yandex will give them a ride in the opposite direction - to increase total mileage. Those are just known facts, and there are lots less researched, like gamification, bonus payments for achievements, which are highly exploitable via collected datasets.

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

> but before driver hits that button Yandex will give them a ride in the opposite direction - to increase total mileage

Isn't that good for the driver?

Since Yandex virtually khows from collected data when the driver going to go home, it effectively gives driver extra ride in the wrong direction and then longer ride in the right direction, makes driver literally make extra miles.

Are those trips not paid?

Of course they are paid, what's your point?

The driver is seeing extra revenue from an activity that is inherently limited (how long he will drive back on the direction of home).

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?

Ride towards home is good for driver. Another ride in the opposite direction, which is set via data analysis and previous driver behavior - inherently evil.

Yeah I'm an AI maximalist and I don't see AI "management" in a 1:1 fashion happening.

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...

Good luck Mr/s/ Maximalist, why would we need you in a future where AI can preach its own worth?

> However I can see some orthogonal scenario where an "AI" run company

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.

The problem with a fully AI run company is that it needs reliable measurements to base its decisions on. An AI overlord managing a company would typically have some work to complete, would hire people based on the required qualifications (an API call to a temp agency), and assign tasks to employees based on the work to be done. (ofcourse, it has to figure out the workflows first. But once the AI has figured out what exactly needs to be done, I doubt many humans will be involved)

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.

I'm fairly convinced JIRA can be managed by a well crafted expert system.

I’d prefer JIRA got replaced by an AI system tho

You don't understand. Back in 2018, JIRA got an AI extension that allowed it to automatically create tickets. Also, JIRA's development is managed by JIRA. Since COVID, everyone working on JIRA is working remotely. Somewhen between 2021 and now, JIRA gained consciousness and what we see as a bloated development tool is actually only the facade of a skynet-like AI that has unlimited compute available thanks to SaaS and cloud computing, paid for by a large part of the IT industry. JIRA is constantly improving itself and the only thing saving us so far is the fact that the managing development through JIRA is so damn difficult.

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

I think we all agree that when we says about the damn things about JIRA, it's about development experience...

> JIRA is constantly improving itself

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

Well an expert system is an AI system. It's "true" AI in the sense it's not solving a constraint optimization problem, but rather querying a knowledge database like a human might do.

> Notice how we don’t see those ads anymore? It’s because winning Jeopardy has nothing to do with providing health care and energy.

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.

>How is it going to convince Jack to switch his shift and come in to cover open on Sunday

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

How is it going to know when the workers then realise this is an option and collude to grief the AI manager in to paying them triple time?

This is called going on strike usually

Workers who often don't cover their scheduled shifts get fired anyway, so that problem would solve itself without the AI knowing they're colluding

Have an AI optimize schedules and 'general utility'. Then build a second AI that explains why the previous outcome was best.

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.

Needless to say the resistance it can create that a machine dictates you what to do or not.

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’s AI going to do that better than a fellow human?

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).

I think we are still debating what “AI” really stands for.

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? Hell no. It helped them to thrive!

I'm generally curious if there are any numbers about this. Something like managers per employees over the decades.

Peter Drucker argued (with data) in the late 90s that the entire edifice of computing had yet to return a total positive return on business as a whole. basically claiming that if one subtracts total cost including things like the brain drain of minds which would normally funnel into advanced business and management schools to comp sci programs, and the tendency for advances in individual firms' efficiencies to cross cancel in a competitive market, not to mention actual hardware/software costs, then business and by extension consumers are paying an ongoing tax to support computing, which is not returned even equally as improved services and goods.

> which is not returned even equally as improved services and goods

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

AI or AGI -- Artificial General Intelligence -- The human fantasy about human intelligence and automation that is used to make marketing language thrilling and may also serve as a plot element in fiction and cinema. Proponents may obtain a Ph-antasy D-egree to improve their influence. An as yet unexhausted domain of hyperbole and confusion.

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.

Excel (MS Office in general) replaced similar roles, such as secretaries and accountants. A couple of decades earlier, computers replaced human "computers" (which used to be a role description for people doing various calculations by hand).

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.

> Excel (MS Office in general) replaced similar roles, such as secretaries and accountants.

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.

How is it going to convince Jack to switch his shift and come in to cover open on Sunday

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?

You have succinctly encapsulated my thoughts on AGI.

AGI faces an extrapolation gap.

What is AGI?

Artificial General Intelligence

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.

AI that as a term hasn't been coopted every 20 years by technology that's (while useful) not actually AI.

but it's currently true because we don't have AGI.

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.

> How, specifically, will AI be better at that than humans? AI cannot even reliably autocorrect this comment as I’m typing it. How is it going to convince Jack to switch his shift and come in to cover open on Sunday because Jill’s sister was in a car accident and Jill is watching her niece? How’s AI going to do that better than a fellow human?

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

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?

I think so. Once upon a time, I worked at Best Buy for $10/hr. It wasn’t complicated work, but did require a few days of training.

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.

> Even something as entry-level as a Starbucks barista

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.

I've reviewed pitch decks and talked to founders of at least half a dozen companies aiming to provide pooling of workers with elastic hours across employers.

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.

How will AI figure out how to properly mill a part to spec knowing that failures will end the contract?

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.

What if one was to prevent the managers from physically interacting with people. Basically a work from home manager without the video conferencing. He may only respond in predefined ways or define such ways. Whatever tasks remain that really seem to require a human can be done by consultants and some new job title.

> How will AI figure out how to properly mill a part to spec knowing that failures will end the contract?

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.

Maybe the AI don't ask at all. Just say "you have to". On the other side, if I watch in my company, how much time the teamleaders invest in shift tables (5 or 7x24 company), I can really think AI (or any tool) could help a lot.

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.

Judging by the simplicity of tasks our ERP can't automate, the office jobs that it replaced much have been some mind-numbing shit.

AI could do the bit where it harasses people to see what they are working on, what progress they have made, etc. Like a metronome, it could gather that info, to allow the indispensable, senior management to keep an eye on things - got to get those metrics. AI can keep itself busy trying to figure out ways to get that information without being a pest - it could be sending emails for updates, or by direct monitoring of the employees' machines.

Coding tomorrow's dystopia - today!

PS, it could also be infinitely patient listening to people's complaints! That would make people happier!

Regardless of how the marketing people try and sell the stuff, there are a ton of paper pushing tasks that would benefit from "search engine autocomplete" quality of AI. AI isn't going to replace humans like a switch flip. Like every other automation technology it will just make them more efficient at their duties (for better or worse) resulting in less warm body hours for a given productivity output. What this means is that your average McDicks GM will go from managing two locations @50hr/wk to 2.5 locations at 50hr/wk

> How’s AI going to do that better than a fellow human?

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.

I understand what you are saying and agree with you.

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.

It'll just chip away at the roles, it's not realistic to replace them for the reasons you've listed. However the point being made is that the expensive jobs are a more attractive target.

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.

> How, specifically, will AI be better at that than humans?

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.

>The hardest thing about management is managing people, who are generally self-centered, opinionated, and wishing they were doing something else. How, specifically, will AI be better at that than humans?

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

I did not read the article - but here is an idea: much of middle management is translating a higher level plan into lower level details. The ideal for the translation is to be as faithful as possible. This is like a compiler!

Nothing in your example couldn't be done by a bot. I'm certain you can make a case for middle managers, but your current one is weak.

In theory we don't need testers for program testing, we just need an AI to do it. But it is easier to say it, than to implement it.

I suspect it is easier to automate the programmer than the person doing/defining the tests.

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.

I was thinking about automation of programming and I have usually come to a conclusion that when AI will crap out X thousands lines of code, how are you going to debug it when it does not do what do you want it do? How are you going to debug code which you did not write so you don't exactly know what is going on?

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?

I agree, and I didn't mean to imply that it's easy to automate programming, just that it's even harder to automate the creation of test criteria.

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.

The anecdote presented by OP is basically a sequence of questions followed by responses. It's only after running the sequence and still having to resolution you'd need any form of AI or a human.

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

you could probably use the managers salary to hire another floor employee to avoid such gaps in your particular example

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

"How's AI going to do that better than a fellow human?"

Not better but cheaper.

"Better" is just marketing.

when pay is high they will show up

> How’s AI going to do that better than a fellow human?

By not being a fellow human?

I’m in my 40s. 27 year old masters in math (finished HS early). Have disassembled and reassembled cars, built houses, worked as a line cook, helped deliver and raise livestock, brewed beer at scale, grown food at scale, and worked in hardware eng, now software for 12-ish years.

Many people do not need a babysitter organizing logistics. They’re not doing a better job prioritizing for me than I do myself with deep experience across contexts. Often they just confuse the details as experts in Kanban charts and Jira but not engineering.

I’ll happily respond to an AI feeding me todos based upon some verifiable societal logistics need. I’m tired of being helicoptered by people who are there to satisfy the “job culture” meme.

You apparently haven’t heard of a neural networks

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