Y Combinator Supports AI Startup Dehumanizing Factory Workers
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'Hey Number 17 ' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175023 - Feb 2025 (122 comments)
Also recent and related:
Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170850 - Feb 2025 (160 comments)
Edit: Per Dang, they have been flagged, but HN has opted to turn off flagging for YC companies.
> It set off the flamewar detector. Moderators haven't touched it, except that we turned off the user flags on the story. Otherwise it would be displaying [flagged] at the top.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170850
This exact tech is already commonplace in industry, but no one is trying to find an industry wide solution, just taking cheap pot shots that the nth startup doing the same thing.
If you don’t like what this startup is doing, build something better instead of virtue signalling here.
And no, this issue isn't something you can out-compete. Authority figures notably love surveillance - no matter if it's your government, a tech megacorp or a manager at a factory. There's no alternative solution that provides the same hit of power and control like surveillance. Social pushback is the only remaining way.
Wow - did you come up with that or is it a quote? That's a great line.
(this is apropos of nothing related to the current story - it just strikes my interests)
I remember the organisational observation making the rounds ... maybe a decade ago (I recall it probably being on Google+ back when that was A Thing), and though this all but certainly isn't the original, it's strongly similar in sentiments:
Company values are invisible – what's rewarded and punished shouldn't (2023)
<https://www.fearlessculture.design/blog-posts/your-culture-i...>
And of course HN had a similar submission 8 years ago, though w/o discussion:
"Culture Is the Behavior You Reward and Punish" (2017)
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13751865>
<https://jocelyngoldfein.com/culture-is-the-behavior-you-rewa...>
Similar notions are that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with (of questionable veracity, though fairly high popularity), see: <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/08/08/five-people/>.
There's the notion that a person, particularly a creative person (artist, musician, author, programmer, experimenter/tinkerer, tailor, soldier, spy, wups, wrong espionage meme) is what they can't not do.
Going back to G+, an observation I'd had on follow + blocking behaviour there was that social network landscapes are defined by the pathways along with information flows with greater or lesser impedence. G+ had a fairly strong block in which a block action (unilateral or reciprocated) meanth that neither party could directly see or interact with the others' content, at least whilst authenticated to the system. (The fact that logging out permitted visibility of otherwise public content meant of course that "blocking" was not an effective mechanism for preventing some adversarial relation from finding out what you were posting so long as that activity was public.
But both in terms of blocks by/against myself, and between other accounts, there was an interesting and somewhat fractured state of discussions particularly in what I've termed "salon" threads: a reasonably gregarious host, with diligent thread hygiene, who tended to attract a broad range of participants and lively discussion. The blocking actions would tend to segment that discussion in ways I still find fascinating.
Which is unrelated to the original comment and observation, though it comes up in context, at least here and now ;-)
Are these acts the same?
Mens rea exists because reasons.
(This is also why surgeons generally request a statement of consent to medical procedures from the patient, where that's tractable, or by a representative --- parent, guardian, someone granted power of attorney, etc --- where the patient themselves is incapable of consent. There are still some loose edges, but this itself is a significant though not sole distinction between the two roles noted.)
Blowing up a building because you're a mobster, and you're "sending a message", is different from a demolition crew doing the same to make way for a new building.
You should really rethink what you're saying. An act is a wholesome, contextualize thing. It does not live in a vacuum.
By your measure, a sexual predator grabbing a woman's vagina and a doctor examing a female patient are identical.
This is a broken mental map of the world.
Factories loose contract over minor delays and issues. Often times the difference between workers enjoying a little humane working conditions is 20 cents, which big retail refuse to pay while the same goods retail for 4X- 5X margin.
The problem isn’t the software, since most factories already employ similar process in other manual ways. Factories that adhere to efficiency survive, those who don’t simply die. Even 10% efficiency boost can mean a lot in industries with razor thin margins.
How could you say this without any sarcasm? This is merchant-of-death logic, you see? Nobody is shifting blame, they are expanding the blame.
So instead of the worker being yelled at because of the AI, the worker will be yelled at because the boss imagines their pile to be smaller than the pile of another worker.
It being common and unfixable is implicit in how this criticism is levelled. Tools that track efficiency should be a great thing. The criticism comes because everyone knows exactly how they will be cruelly used and that is treated as unfixable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170850 Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers (476 points, 163 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175023 'Hey Number 17 ' (329 points, 125 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43180133 Y Combinator deletes posts after a startup's demo goes viral (203 points, 73 comments)
Assume that both the boss and the worker believe that their productivity expectation and result are fair, respectively. It is obvious that they will never see eye to eye.
In my opinion, it is for the worker to become more detached, not less, to treat the employment as temporary, to not invest one's expectations into lasting employment. All else is beside the point.
Near-peak Silicon Valley. Surprised they didn’t figure out how to do fraudulent medical tests as well for a side business.
serious late stage capitalism stuff right here and goes against the advice of successful business leaders that you have to instill trust and confidence in your team to get them to perform.
Whoever made that AI should read Ricardo Semler and Paul Orfalea and stop drinking the tech bro get rich kool-aid and build a business that makes the world better, not worse.