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Comment by opwieurposiu | Hacker News Reader

I witnessed the dystopian future where humans are slaves to machines at my favorite local Mexican restaurant. It was about an hour before close. The kids and I were the only customers there. Before we ordered our food we had to wait for the staff to explain to a very annoyed door dasher that the meal they were here for had already been picked up by someone else. As we ate dinner over the next half hour, a new door dasher would arrive every few minutes in an attempt to pick up that same already-picked-up order.

Eventually eight people had been sent by the machines to pick up the same order!

So no, robots are not required to enslave humans and cause them misery, an app will suffice.

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It's fascinating and deeply unsettling that corporate policies now extend into people's daily lives, dictating their _literal_ physical movements through an always on tracking devices.

In this case, it goes even further. A faceless corporate entity not only monitors movements but also _automates_ performance scoring and should these metrics decline, another automated system steps in to close accounts, freeze funds, or punish the person in a different manner.

The sheer dystopian nature of it is hard to ignore..

It is not an app or delivery service that enslaves humans. Politicians and lobbists do. Working in delivery doesn’t have to be modern day slavery with no viable escape routes for many. All an app does is limiting interaction between parties involved, which may be stupid but not enslaving.

This has happened to me. I can't remember the explanation, but the solution for deliverypeople caught by it is kind of fun. Ideally, the restaurant will just remake the order, but if they won't, it's sometimes advantageous to just pay for a second iteration of the order and deliver that. You see, at this point, the platform will have run up the delivery fee considerably, trying to get the order delivered - often to considerably above the cost of the food (that's why so many people were taking it). I'm sure this could backfire if the platform decides to cancel the order in-transit, but it might be worth risking if the fee is high enough (or if you'd eat the food yourself if you could no longer deliver it).

There was that pharmacy/market that had a wheeled robot patrolling the isles looking for spills, and the bot would call a human wagie to come mop it up.

You might like (or hate) to check out Eric Sadin's "Injunctive turn of Technology"

An incompetent manager would also do the job )

Why does someone always have to chime in “But humans can be bad, too!” We shouldn’t advertise for these companies by denigrating other people.

The app economy sucks.

Because it's an important reminder that it doesn't need to be perfect to replace you.

I don't know man, somebody mentioned complete outlier "dystopian" machine behavior. For every one of those, I've eaten at 10 restaurants with the delivery line absolutely swamped with orders and deliveries happening like the clockwork of an assembly line.

I wish the restaurants and delivery drivers made more money in the exchange but none of that is the machines fault (AI doesn't set Doordash's margins).

At the end of it all, humans are mostly responsible for other humans' misery. No AI required.

the apps only do what people tell them to do.

the same executives that push the manager to be bad are the ones pushing for the apps to be bad.

the apps arent bad in and of themselves. couch surfing and warm showers arent putting in exhorbitant cleaning fees.

silicon valley invented managerless misery without even knowing

I suppose the question is here, who is the more incompetent manager, the machine or the human

The problem with a machine isn't that it's sometimes incompetent, it's that it can't be reasoned with in the face of a deteriorating situation

I _suspect_ that those 8 door-dashers were not compensated for being sent to a restaurant to pick up an already-delivered order, because they failed to complete the delivery.

I've met people like that but usually after the third time something doesn't work they pause and reassess.

if the same circumstance happend due to human clerical error by a local delivery shop would you consider it enslavement or just an honest mistake.

I think theres a weird tribal alignment angle in your interpretation of the scenario.

You consider computers and machines to be an other, and so in this circumstance youre mind is framing it as subjugation.

The problem isn't computers being considered an "other", but rather that other people are using computers to unilaterally scale up the implementation of their own negligence/biases/"policy" while also insulating themselves from corrective feedback or other repercussions. This makes poor results feel willful rather than being considered honest mistakes.

The first part isnt really an assertion of fact but of perspective.

Consider if the delivery logistics tracking was executed by men working with paper in an office in the 1920's, and the policy was a managers. That is still "unilateral" as people who are not the manager dont have control over the policy, nor necessarily the capital to create a competitor policy.

Additionally, there is corrective feedback. This errant policy costs the delivery company reputation, sales, time, customers. In so far as the error signal isnt so small as to be buried under the noise floor, in which case it isnt a very serious issue, its repurcussions will be felt.

Your first part is relying on some assertion that scale makes no difference, when the whole crux of the matter is that it does. If a person bumps into you on the sidewalk, you will give them the benefit of the doubt. If that person has done it to a bunch of other people, you likely won't have as much tolerance. If that person is being paid to get in your way (eg using social engineering to put trashvertisements in people's hands), you likely won't have any.

Your second part is channeling the efficient market fallacy, and then tautologically writing off "small" problems as not important enough. But once again, the problem is the scale itself. Something that hurts 0.01% of customers/users is never going to move the needle of organizational feedback, but at a scale of ten million customers/users that is still 1000 people that get hurt. Human scale limits fan out and allows direct feedback, surveillance industry scale does neither.

I think there are flaws in this reasoning.

To reiterate my point from before incase there was misunderstanding: Scale applies before computers. If it is matter of subjugation now it would also apply 200 years ago to designated bread makers in London, or to clerical errors involving iron shipments in the 1860s that resulted in ship crew deaths. Even if you see those as the same as now, the poster I was responding to seemed upset by the otherness of the machine made decision, the algorithmic identity, which is the topic of the post, hence me making a point of it.

Lets now consider your idea that scale makes things evil:

Would any level of scale of production or service beyond your nearest friends and family implicitly become evil? No service is 100% efficient. Mistakes resulting in a few cents increased costs on any mass produced goods result in millions of dollars of cost absorbed by consumers. That isnt a statement of harm, it is just fact. But the alternative is no bread for most people. Its just a matter of practicality.

Is all bread that is not homemade evil to you?

Thirdly, companies often make corrections for minority error cases. This happens all the time in video games played by millions of people. They will patch out some bug that affected a small minority of players.

There is a limited amount of effort that can be put forth to solve problems. Ranking problems from largest to smallest is not an unreasonable policy. I just dont know what your criticisms would lead you to propose as practical alternatives. It seems pointless.

From Wikipedia:

> As of December 31, 2020, the platform [DoorDash] was used by 450,000 merchants, 20,000,000 consumers, and over one million delivery couriers ("Dashers")

Do you have examples of bread makers or ship crews where a handful of people directed a million workers, directly without intermediaries that could make their own decisions?

> Lets now consider your idea that scale makes things evil: Would any level of scale of production or service beyond your nearest friends and family implicitly become evil?

The flaw is in your reasoning. Just because some level of scaling is good, does not mean that any level of scaling is good. You're ignoring that quantitative differences create qualitative differences.

I dont have the assumption that scale implicitly means evil.

Im sorry I think this just comes down to differences in values.

I cant follow your logic because to follow it I have to accept the premise that selling bread to 100 people is good, but to 1000000 is bad. Everything you are saying depends on me believing that and I dont.

reminds me of this article https://scholars-stage.org/uber-is-a-poor-replacement-for-ut...

Hell is other row-butts.

If it was japanese workers in japan at a japanese store you wouldnt see it as slavery. It would be just a funny bug that would needs fixing.

There is probably a racial component to your perception that doesnt need to be there.

You seem to be making a wild leap in logic here?

i dont think so.

I live in japan and I dont see this political slave talk here ever.

its a western guilt thing.

You have completely missed the point. It is not that 'people who work in Mexican restaurants are enslaved' it's that 'restaurant workers and delivery drivers are forced to work for nothing due to a software glitch' The kind of cuisine is irrelevant.

It's a dehumanizing thing.

What are you talking about?

If this were set in Japan as you propose, and we substituted “onigiri stall” or “izakaya” for “Mexican restaurant,” would that affect the substance of the gp’s observation?

To my mind, when gp said “Mexican restaurant,” that conjured a familiar image of a particular type of informal, moderately sized, sit-in-and-delivery kind of establishment that’s probably a small business rather than managed as a corporate chain. And I wouldn’t assume that a Mexican restaurant is necessarily staffed by people of Mexican ancestry.

I do feel like, in my limited exposure to Japanese culture, I hear less worry than I do from Americans about problems on this spectrum of individual economic freedom/empowerment <—> enslavement. But that’s an observation in which I’m very far from confident—I’d be curious to hear how it fits (or doesn’t) with the broader point you’re making.

Maybe you are correct in that the mexican restraunt conjures up images of typical restraunt. I do think there is associative bleed.

I think thoughts do not follow formal logic and words function as embeddings. My suspicion is the word "slave" in english has other encodings in it that arent strictly the general definition of slave, and that the high magnitude of those signals within the slave embedding will ellicit unreasonable responses. A bug in uber software is no more enslaving the deliverers than a distribution error made by a human on paper in the 1950s resulting in a truck driver driving a shipment of vegetables to the wrong grocery store is enslaving them to drive. The procedure does not commit the immoral act of enslaving. It is an emergent error in logic with complicit actors.

Unrelated side point, lived in Texas for almost 30 years, and every mexican restraunt is owned and operated by mexicans except the rare one that is run by chinese/vietnamese (which generally are not very good).

On japanese culture: Japanese frequently discusses "black companies", and poor boss worker relationships. My wife complains to me about her work every day, and so do all of her coworkers, and their friends when they get togethor. This sort of human to human mistreatment topic is an extremely common point of discussion in Japan. However it isnt framed with the term slavery. That seems to be a western fetish, and its due to the relationship the US has to slavery and it pulls in emotive racial bias, and an image of conflict between groups. Software isnt a tribe to go to combat with for sovereignty. Its just code.

> However it isnt framed with the term slavery. That seems to be a western fetish, and its due to the relationship the US has to slavery

I think “slavery” has much higher salience in the US than in the Western world in general. How many other nations fought a civil war over the topic?

Well historically I assume there have been many nations that had slaves, but the slaves were either subjugted to the point of losing their identity, or it was not racial.

The US has a self inflicted complex about it. People in Japan dont feel sorry about the Korean rapes. Descendants of slave owners the world over are free from ancestral guilt.

I do think the sensetivity is unreasonable.

I didnt read that at all, could you be at risk of projecting here?

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