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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

No, it's not. Some people truly need it.

The status quo is a joke. The threshold for considering behavior toxic is too high.

Now we have the technology to end the bullshit.

If you are interrupting, ignoring others, bluffing, lying, manipulating, gaslighting, being a sycophant, playing dirty... you are no longer playing the game. There are ways of achieving things that do not involve cheating.

If you disagree, then I have to ask you: are you really being collaborative and inclusive, working for a common goal, or you are simply being selectively inclusive and collaborative up to the point it's time to sabotage others?

There are people out there that get ahead by being irrational, selfish and overall horrible. Let's get them out of the way and let the best ideas win.

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Very dystopian. It works well as farce, if it were one.

Human intelligence is tainted with lower forms of intelligence from less evolved animals. The brain is structurally a monolith where structures responsible for advanced cognitive brain functions are built on top of older brain structures from millions of years prior.

Primitive animals are less social, less collaborative and cannot collaborate in large groups. There are vestigial behaviors from them that arise once in a while in humans. It's time to evolve and press the mute button on lower ape behavior. Humans cannot do it reliably.

Automatically detecting and flagging selfish individuals that cannot work in groups and actively sabotage their group by preventing the best ideas from prevailing is something worth trying.

The reason everyone is seeing therapists is because some people are determined to ruin the work experience for others. We can do better.

You’re proposing that an imperfect AI flags (ok) or fires (wow) employees based on potentially bad input.

Same thing on muting mic or doing any kind of auto moderation.

That’s going very far on an imperfect technology. I’d sooner bet on autonomous driving than people using such a moderator.

No, it's not.

We already employ profanity filters in multiplayer games. We also have rating systems in games that allow peers to flag toxic behavior after a game session for review. These have helped limiting the harm caused by toxic players.

Those are simple low tech solutions that could be added to videoconferencing applications.

Did someone act toxic during a meeting? Allow participants to report a toxic interaction, with an AI generated transcript + recording.

Then you can go one step further and build the future of HR playbook enforcement:

"Meeting participant #1234, you are engaging in toxic behavior and are in direct violation of the HR playbook page 113 section 9: please stop disrupting the meeting and shut the hell up to avoid disciplinary action. You have 10 seconds to comply. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...". /s

But jokes aside... Today we have great sentiment analysis capabilities. There is a subset of the English language you should never use at work. We can also detect if someone is yelling. We can flag highly offensive terms. There are ways in which we can apply technology in a sensible way to improve the work experience, to limit the harm caused by the worst types of behaviors including but not limited to violence.

We can also use technology to hold HR accountable to enforce the HR playbook.

I guess when we get to have AGI agents, they will start replacing HR, even though I doubt this will sit well with anyone. Again, it’s dystopian. Maybe in a Demolition Man world.

But today? Wew

Some stuff can be classified as toxic and universally unacceptable with high confidence. That is the low hanging fruit we can begin with.

A reputation system with user submitted information can also help.

I don't need some half-baked language model to stand up for myself. Thanks, though.

You don't? what if you were an H-1B that, in the event of termination, has a grace period of 60 days to find a job. In an at-will employment company?

Then you would think 1000 times before saying anything that can get you marked for termination.

What in tarnation

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