'Hey Number 17 '
404media.co
404media.co
This easily could have been spun in a positive light, imagine a commercial where they use their technology to discover that an employee was using a broken machine or that there was a bottleneck farther up the assembly line that could improve rates! But no, it was a cold look into how sweatshop operators view their workers.
Edit: his number range is 1-100 instead of 1-20 so different
You don't get to create this product and then absolve yourself of its negative impact of it.
[1] Y Combinator supports an AI startup that's pitching granular machine vision surveillance of factory workers.
It's relevant because this furthers this idea that current early AI technology is not about making the world a better plance and is instead used to accelerate the worst aspects of humanity.
Sadly, the abuse of workers is not a novel idea. So the conversation should be more towards how we establish an ethical attitude towards how we make use of LLM's
Can't it be about both?
A common trend among techies nowadays is doing marketing themselves as a part of personal branding, and then figuring out why marketing departments exist the hard way. The possibility of unforseen consequences is very high.
If I ever create a startup I'll shut down all my social media and hire a community manager first, just to be safe. And I don't plan on creating a dystopian startup.
But no, right to insults and presumably firing right after the clip ended. Why would any VC company knowingly go near this with a 10 ft pole?
In my mind these guys are essentially telling on themselves for being clueless about most of what they're designing the software for. They think they get it, they're super confident, but when it comes down to it they're designing software based around very constrained and biased ideas of how factories should operate. They think they're innovating but they're actually trying to entrench patterns they think work well (but might not at all). Not bringing anything new or interesting, but regurgitated ML patterns other people innovated.
They are designing it to sell. Their potential buyers are sociopaths just like them. These buyers, in turn, will also not benefit from the software, but I do imagine it would sell nicely. SNAFU.
I am not their employee, neither do I want to contribute to a future where supermarkts turn into depots without any employees other than the folks that at 6 AM discharge their truck with the new supplies.
Doesn't matter how long I have to wait on the regular payment queue.
Yes. SF author imagines it would be more efficient to concentrate the proles of into a small agglomeration of buildings. It's easier for the policebots to keep track of the economically worthless underclass that way, you see. https://marshallbrain.com/manna4#:~:text=terrafoam
Wouldn't you rather have an Earth where all of mankind shares in the fruits of automation of labour and everyone can live a blessed live? Read the last few chapters of the story.
Spin all you want, there's no sugarcoating this orwellian aberration
Same tech, better value communication to all stakeholders
Mohta wrote, “My family also runs several manufacturing plants in various industries, which has given me unrestricted access to assembly lines since I was 15.” "
So these guys come from families that run factories and manage workers. They NEVER worked in one themselves. It's their turn to sit in the factory for 12 hour a day, 5+ days a week and have AI assisted asses badgering them all day.
I'm reminded of this famous Jefferson quote:
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
I think it's natural for us to want to climb ever-higher on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and I think that's essentially what Jefferson was expressing.
But there's a perverse version of this that happens in our society, because for so many of us life gets framed as a ladder or a hill you have to climb, and your position feels so very precarious - no matter where you start or how high you climb!
And so we see certain work as "beneath our station". I don't want to make assumptions about what's in the hearts of these particular founders, but I've met plenty who grow to see even the work of their own parents as beneath them, because no matter how high you started, it's a failure if you ever slip below.
For so many of us, being in a position to own and operate multiple manufacturing plants would afford us a life of relative luxury and status beyond what we imagine we could realistically achieve. But to someone who can practically inherit that position by default, even that isn't enough. They need to automate it away, to build a larger empire, to take another step up the wealth and status ladder.
I'm not sure exactly how to criticize this. I agree with the spirit of that Jefferson quote. I often think of my own life and the lives of my kids through the lens of Maslow's hierarchy. I think maybe the problem is that the material wealth and social status that get used as a ruler for measuring a "good life" have become so incredibly de-coupled from actually doing good work and/or being a good person.
As an “if we all work together we can achieve this paradise within three generations from where we are“.
Reminded of this line from chapter 13 of Mitchell's freehand Tao Te Ching translation[1]:
Whether you go up the ladder or down it, you position is shaky.
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...
As for this tech: it should die in a fire. If the creators read this, they should understand that they are potentially inventing the shackles that they themselves will be bound in (albeit later).
I think a lot of techies are under the mistaken impression that when they're done building the society of Elysium, for some reason the billionaires are going to take them along to the space station to live with them.
Either that or they’re not thinking about the future at all and just doing it for the near instant gratification of a high salary.
IMO, this is more likely.
Speculation on my part, but this evinces the kind of tech-focused education that I personally know to be pervasive in India. The curriculum omits any "history of technology" or "ethics in innovation", so at best, these founders are missing a core part of "humanistic" learning.
At worst... well, why go there? They're from privileged backgrounds, and mere ignorance is enough to explain this kind of short-sighted "innovation", without adding malice into the mix.
Well most of us, when software development automation becomes good enough, we will be the new factory workers queuing for food tickets, while a few lucky ones get to be those in charge of the software factory.
Every sweatshop like that has high turnover rates, and micromanaging bosses that... let's say make sure these rates don't fall.
If these bosses are the target audience, then I guess the ad is well made? Identify bad employees faster so you can hire better ones quicker, yada yada. I can imagine how this promise can make someone want to buy the software, so fair play for the ad creators, I guess?
I really hope this project fails though.
Looking at this 2023 article[0], a lot. 35000 workers on three factories in India, solely dedicated to produce recent gen iPhones, with depcting of manual assembly down to screwing parts. I was expecting they automatized a lot more.
Workers don't have enough agency to significantly pervert the metrics.
They can cut corners and/or work slower, but that's not inherently related to the metrics, and there is no long term view for the workers in the first place.
If you want plot a worker's performance graphs (and fire them for underperformance), you don't need any AI or vision or even a computer, just a supervisor who manually counts the workers' outputs.
"Hey number 17, how come you made only has 10 boxes this morning, while number 16's has made 25 boxes already. Work harder!"
Unlike AI stuff, it will only be daily/twice-per-day; but that is still enough for the dystopia that is described in the article.
No, but it adds friction and slows down the corruption. Sometimes that can be just as important as making long term preventative measurements.
A better method of efficiency is also commonly practiced by some factories, which is to pay per unit. This practice ties the earning to the output and is far more efficient. Workers do feel in control and can earn 3X - 4X if they were on monthly salary. However this method is skill oriented and many not be practical all the time, plus it can be a little costly.
The assembly line method is a cheaper alternative, since it forfeits the need for every workers to be equally skilled. The downside to this method is that inefficiency can easily creep in.
a camera pointed straight at your face every working moment
profiling
use of AIInstead, will they be the tools of our enslavement to The Man?
I am not saying that good things didn't happen, but where there is money to be made, money WILL be made. And for some countries that don't enjoy regulations like GDPR (China, India, with growing economies 'solutions' like this will definitely come to play). Some people will replace a form of slavery with a newer form of slavery.
How else could you compel a farmworking class to provide for other segments of the society?
India.. don't get me started. There is no law in that land. Hasn't been one. Will not be one for the next thousand years. Let's not be graphic, let's just say that "caste system", "women's right" and leave it at that. GDPR requires rule of just (as from Justice) law. Caste system and rule of law are conflicting terms.
A group who, contrary to popular belief, were not 'anti-technology'.
The fact they campaigned for unemployment support and re-training for workers displaced by the new technologies probably makes the Luddites amongst the most forward thinking and progressive people of the industrial revolution!
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus
[2] https://criterioncloseup.com/2015/06/14/modern-times-1936-ch...
You gotta really wonder what they are going to teach you at the "AI Startup School" they keep advertising at the bottom of this site..
And yet when you listen to what some of the highest-performing athletes say, they'll readily admit they don't go 100% effort 100% of the time. In fact, that's often a very bad thing to do because you can burn out quickly, and then the opposing team who paced themselves a little better starts running over you. However, there are spurts of intense activity where you really do go 100%, and then you quickly dial that back again to make sure you have effort reserved in the tank. Ideally you get down to 0 at the end of the game, but it's also readily acknowledged that sometimes this is out of your control, and often in quite significant ways, like the football bouncing weirdly when it popped out of someone's hands.
All of this is to say that there's a deep obsession in the corporate world around efficient teams performing labor, but when you get into organized sports where there's literal teams fighting for an objective, they don't chase "efficiency" that would amount to "time doing useful things on the field". Such a measure would be ridiculous.
As a business, even as a "project" the needs change between the start and the end of a project. Periods of low and high activity coincide with the various phases of things. Expecting some crunch time at the end and allowing some slack time at the start/middle allows a natural flow.
Now managers have decided employees must work at a high level of output/at crunch time pace ALL the time. Any change in forecasted points, burn down results in meltdowns at the VP and higher levels, while actual expectations, requirements and deadlines are changed at the drop of a hat multiple times.
Waterfall (not the sprint version of waterfall, the Deming version of waterfall with iteration between steps) gives a much more natural alignment of this while also ensuring the starting point doesn't get shifted at the whims of a VP with a "good idea" in the middle of a project.
Bingo! Sport's teams avoid burning out the talent, because they are hard to replace. Corporates are ambivalent at best, with most accepting some churn for higher profitability. They may even pay for mental health benefits to ameliorate the effects, but remain happy with a "high performance" burnout culture where people cycle out after 18-24 months.
Read the article and realized it wasn't.
Thought about it some more and realized it was, just accidentally.
Not to go too much into an ideological diatribe about class solidarity and such, I do wish that in light of cases like these, we as tech workers would reflect on the "worker" part and not get totally blinded from the exploitation of less fortunate people in different field. Consider me slightly cynical, though.
"Today, workers who get paid per week might not notice they are working slow, and be super surprised when they get a very small paycheck at the end of the week. But with our technology, we give them the early warnings, so they can speed up so their paycheck is bigger! See, we benefit them!"
It's all B.S. of course, but founders can be pretty convincing - charisma is one of the major requirements for their job.
The article points this out: both come from families owning sweatshop^W factories, so that's the bubble. They probably were applauded by their fathers for the good idea and execution.
Who knows? Maybe they could insulate themselves. Maybe they got a bunch of views but the ones that fit their current purview prevailed.
>never having had made friends with or developed at least some kind of empathy towards people unlike themselves.
people throw around the term too loosely nowadays, but psychopathy/sociopathy can be a legitmate explantion. Supposedly, CEO's have a disproportionately high amount of sociopathy. I wonder if its something you can develop from environmental factors?
These are exactly the types of people that go to Duke
No. They will not be 'held accountable' nor rewarded for good performance. The reward will be the ever-rising bar on performance until management is satisfied that they will never be required to pay out on those motivational performance bonuses and that workers fear for their jobs.
Edit: to add a discordance btw Mana and Optifye.ai's vision, for 404 and Optifye, the tool is used by managers to browbeat workers; for Mana, the managers were among the first to go. Why bother with a human to say “You haven’t hit your hourly output . . . this is really bad!”?
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
The employees were told exactly what to do, and they did it quite happily. It was a major relief actually, because the software told them precisely what to do step by step.
For example, when Jane entered the restroom, Manna used a simple position tracking system built into her headset to know that she had arrived. Manna then told her the first step.
Manna: “Place the ‘wet floor’ warning cone outside the door please.”
When Jane completed the task, she would speak the word “OK” into her headset and Manna moved to the next step in the restroom cleaning procedure.> Many slaveowners, including Jefferson, understood that female slaves—and their future children—represented the best means to increase the value of his holdings, what he called “capital.” "I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm," Jefferson remarked in 1820. "What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption."
Instead of creating a digital whip for shallow (or even outright harmful) managers, they could have developed a QA tool grounded in real, deep thinking—one that respects proven principles of manufacturing.
There’s still time to course-correct, and embracing some of the foundational literature on the topic could make the difference.
/s
The closest classes I took could be summarized as:
* Snowden: good or bad?
* Poor people should try enjoying rich-people hobbies!
* Does it belong in a museum, or should it be returned to the descendants of the people it was taken from? (actually a very interesting class)
Color me not remotely surprised.
One hopeful note is that the apathy goes both ways: harm is just a means to an end, and if we can offer alternative paths to those ends that don't incentivize harm then we'd all be better for it.
This kind of company, as well as the activities of YC generally, is evidence that we have normalized a certain kind of harm through the development of our economic and government institutions. Those with low affect and who struggle in the empathy department are more than happy to live with ideologies that ignore suffering as long as it's separated by one or more layers of bureaucracy. This normalization is essentially sanity-washing for the profit motive.
I don't see anything indicating this trend will reverse in the near future, there's a pathology in society that seems to prevent actual accountability these days.
This is psychopaths!!! Sociopaths are different. Sociopaths just lack empathy, they do not necessarily want to do anything with that. Psychopaths are the ones who intentionally cause harm. Psychopaths can have empathy and simply choose to ignore it.
The DSM-V does not list either sociopathy or psychopathy, so any definitions ultimately have no authority and are merely colloquial.
That being said, I remember an effort to discourage the use of "psychopath" and to move them under the umbrella of "sociopath" since it was more of a condition affecting social behaviors than psychology per se.
A few background thoughts...
I remember browsing angel.co, and most of the startup blurbs were just depressing -- either crypto scams, or people who sounded unaware that they were doing something bad for society. Many worse-sounding than this one. So depressing, that even LinkedIn was a more pleasant place to be scrolling job listings.
But there can't be that many sociopaths, as it appeared there were on angel.co; they're probably mostly just people with not much world experience, and perhaps too much techbro echo chamber time, now going through the motions they were taught about how to be a startup founder.
Also, there's modes based on context, and I'll embarrass myself here... I remember during the dotcom gold rush, when I'd already had wholesome values instilled in me, plus the usual Internet-before-it-went-corporate values, yet I found on occasion I got distracted from those, in a mode. I was a grad student with a research assistantship, in a lab that had sponsors and VIPs coming through every day. I recall one time some people from a particular huge music industry company came through. So, I start telling them something about the emerging democratization of creation and distribution of high-quality music... and how I thought their company can get ahead of that. Afterwards, I was, like, why did I go out of my way to do that, like an amoral hired gun? On any other day, I'd be trying to help people to be empowered, and encourage them to get rid of that same company.
Going back to this particular application domain, another thought... If you've worked with factory people, at least the ones I did (in a startup introducing a new factory station) were delightful, and I can't imagine imposing this system on people there. Maybe that's another reason to know your customers and users: not only understanding the problem domain and getting the MVP right, but also to engage our natural human empathy and caring.
If anything, I think they're unaware or sugar-coating it, but not doing a great PR job of that for US audiences.
Edit: They know exactly what they are doing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175023#43176516
(Though, one of my snap judgments is that this is probably worse than they realize, over 0.6 probability, unless they're far into their sales meetings, or have a lot of world experience. The impression in the video is that they're imagining a class-based dynamic, with someone from a lower class than them being a lazy and unmotivated problem worker, and how they think is culturally appropriate to interact. That might actually be what they envision. But we have enough analogous examples, for decades, to assume that many customers will use it even worse. And with interaction flavors that are more culturally familiar and recognizable to us in the US.)
Edit: I didn't see your edit link when I responded. Yes, I think that link fits my first impression. I'll stand by my position that the condemning comments have been done enough, and that some other nuance and alternate interpretations might apply, and are worth mentioning, for this case and in general.
To quote a wise guy "I prefer my Nazis in uniform" (so I can properly identify and punch them in the face without them having any "oh but you misunderstood my good intentions sir"-kind of excuse).
What were they thinking?
Reminds me of 1984. Ministry of Peace = Department of War. Ministry of Plenty = Keep state in artificial scarcity.
All the AI techbros about AI gonna revolutionize the world and bring abundance = we're gonna make lives miserable for the 99%, and make ourselves billionaires.
In unrelated I saw a license plate with just “YC” today.
I thought the article was gonna be the following joke:
It’s a guys first night in jail. At 9pm one of the other inmates yells “51!” And all the other inmates laugh and laugh. A moment later another inmate yells “29!” And all the other inmates laugh and laugh. The new inmate asks the cellmate - what’s going on with the numbers? The other inmate replies, “we’ve all been in here so long we assigned jokes to a number and just say them instead. Why don’t you give it a try?”
So the new inmates yells - “14!”. And it’s silent The new inmate asked the cellmate, “what happened, what did I do wrong?”
And the cellmate said, “you didn’t tell it right..”
But seriously, who approved posting that (before it was deleted)?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/10/21/disne...
Well in a void, yes, but in reality, no: You pay prices to acquire things. Occasionally we increase efficiency with no downsides aside from investment cost or complexity, but much more commonly at least part of the price paid is increased pressure on those at the bottom (lower wages, unemployment, time, stress, dignity, etc etc).
It's worse than this, the product designers are marketing to the manufacturers that place the least possible value on the things that allow it to exist - workers and society.
At Optifye, I am using my expertise in computer vision to solve a manufacturing company owner's biggest problem: low labor productivity!
At what point does demanding top efficiency from a human every minute of every work shift cross the line into abuse? I would argue this tool is miles over that that line.
Workplaces should server the workers too, not just the capital interests of the owners.
Minimizing human value leads to greater dividends to the only parties that ultimately matter - execs and shareholders.
Dodge vs Ford has safeguarded these parasitic behaviors for over a century.
ref: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
The case, Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, was about minority shareholders' ability to challenge the authority of the board of directors to make business decisions that were alleged to be serving interests other than maximizing the value of plaintiffs' shares.Instead it looks like the next abstract evolution of a whip.
The last thread was just someone drawing attention to what they saw. This thread is in response to an investigative piece by 404 Media.
Low wage labor is not very valuable at all, and has very low margins on it. The gap between "profitable worker" and "unprofitable worker" is the absolute smallest at the bottom. These workers keep almost all value they create and are never in a position to generate massive value. They are perpetually right on the threshold of being unprofitable to employ.
So the problem then becomes "How do you keep a worker above that profitability threshold when they are barely above it?". You can have kludgey borderline inhumane approaches like this, or maybe try to use perks as coercion to hit targets, but not matter what it's a very difficult problem to solve.
Everyone jumps to "Pay them more" but almost everyone is unaware (and certainly unwilling) that that would necessitate cutting money from their checks to buffer the profitability threshold of these bottom tier workers.
Spare me your BS.
I won't shed any tears for capital either, but pretending they're going to operate a charity out of the goodnesses of their hearts and not a business that generates profit is not a winning strategy to get them to socialize the means of production.
Various reasons. It's not like life is as simple as "make profit -> operate".
>They're not running a charity, so they will just close that factory and open it somewhere else with cheaper labor due to lax labor laws.
Okay, and we as a first world country should refuse to work with inhumane companies. If that passes costs to the first world, so be it.
> but pretending they're going to operate a charity out of the goodnesses of their hearts
I don't understand why you're taking the other extreme. You can not treat people like crap even if you are paying bad wages. It's basic respect, and that costs nothing.
They can choose not to treat people like crap, but I don't know about you, but when I go to the store, and the thing I want is made in China for $20 or not for $30, I have a hard time wanting to choose the $30 one over the cheaper one, and factory owners know this.
I'm not in the best financial situation, but it is one of my missions to try and fight back against this long term. I won't let Apathy erode away at me as well.
If your job is to create one $20 bill every hour, why would anyone ever pay you more than $20/hr to do it? Maybe you get paid $17/hr to do it, $2 goes to overhead and $1 goes to the boss. There are 100 workers so the boss is making $100/hr. If you can solve this problem for how to make the 100 workers "rich" as well, then you will (ironically) become the richest person on Earth.
Sure, and you know what I do when it's unprofitable? I just don't do it. I don't think "can I find someone and pay pennies for it?"
Your metaphor doesn't work because It's missing the human element to begin with. There's low paying jobs, and then there's dehumanizing jobs. That isn't a financial incentive, that's a power move.
We could have an amazing society if everyone was all in on "the human element", but the fact of the matter is that the "human element", verifiably, is "As much as I can purchase for as little money as possible".
Your boss wants cheap labor as much as you want cheap housing. Everyone everywhere wants everything as cheap as possible. Organic local carrots @ $6/lb are great, but not as great as the ones @ $4/lb, all else being equal (which doesn't even matter, the human element hardly extends beyond price already).
My point is that hand waving away reality under the guise of hollywood-esque black and white, good guys/bad guys is naive and childish. The world is not a movie or book. Real solutions with tangible benefits come from true understanding of how things work, not virtue signaling takes that con people into thinking capitalism is bad guys twisting mustaches and oppressed saints being exploited.
I can only imagine what a flop a movie based on everyday reality would be, where it's difficult to discern who is actually the bad guy.
I'm not providing a solution, I'm negating an unethical one. I don't have an answer to world hunger, but I can negate wiping out half the humans on earth as a solution, despite being a valid approach in a vacuum.
>Your boss wants cheap labor as much as you want cheap housing.
Okay, we don't live in Want-Land. Business have to follow laws and hire under regulations, and I have the follow the rules and find a way to house myself. What's your point? We don't get to break rules because they are inconvenient.
>I can only imagine what a flop a movie based on everyday reality would be, where it's difficult to discern who is actually the bad guy.
There's no purely good or buy guys. That doesn't mean that's an excuse to not strive for good. Fatalism does no one good and it's not really a good counterargument to injustices.
You can choose to do nothing. I'd rather not discourage good just because you personally have up.
If all the low wage laborers stopped working, society would stop functioning. Sounds pretty valuable to me.
But even if everything you say is true, we can still refer to these people as something slightly more humanizing than "number 17", and generally treat with a basic minimum of respect ("are you okay, work seems to have slower down" rather than immediately jumping to bollocking mode).
Productivity monitoring for factory workers is nothing new, or even controversial as such, but having a camera pointed directly at your face all day that your supervisors can monitor is pretty invasive (never mind that this is just the "bum on seat" type of "productivity").