161–170 of 379 posts
This seems completely far-fetched and it gives the impression that the author has no idea what middle management entails. Middle managers are a business' communication infrastructure and the idea that those mostly soft skills can be done by a computer is laughable.
We need AI personal assistants to handle mundane shit while we do things that solve problems. Most people are reasonably capable of managing themselves once given initial direction.
I think this article fundamentally misunderstands the core function of middle management. You can boil it down to 2 key tasks (on the front lines of a very large organization). a) Interpreting: either top->down by explaining and enforcing corporate policy on hourly workers or bottom->up by ensuring workers enter data to be reported on correctly b) "Encouraging": an employee calls in sick, again. Neither firing them o…
>Neither of these are low hanging fruit for automation The Uber app already does both of these things. Encouragement is done via gamification and adjusting pricing and the app itself collects all the data it needs and explains everything the driver needs to know.
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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.…
> 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 m…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
> 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 m…
So to answer your question, yes it sure can.
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In what dystopian country do you live where you don't automatically get the day off when calling in sick?
While I agree that encouraging a sick employee to work is all kinds of messed up, most countries impose a limit on sick days. At that point, you need to talk to the employee and figure out a solution.
The manager gets involved at performance evaluation time, or if it has severe otherwise impacts (you're then asking the person to potentially leave), but I don't see the "figure out a solution" part of it. Asking someone to be less sick feels complicated.
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>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
Last year I tendered a logo redesign to freelancers on a specialized website. The experience was not pleasant. After all they are humans. They had diverging interests. Two designers did something I liked and I would have liked to combine their work, but they didn't cooperate. I had to compromise. One of the designers got very angry at me because of that compromise. The other one didn't give me all the files I request…
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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…
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It reads like you are describing reporting. How many frowny faces were sent out at Store 123 last month for attendance? But the reason you need lower/middle mgmt is that the real question is "so what do we do to stop having these frowny faces?"
What the system does is the rostering system preferences the workers with the highest scores when assigning shifts. And I suppose makes this number viewable to the workers so they can see why they have to optimise.
We could do this with developers too. Give the biggest raise to the developers with the most lines of code committed, and maybe design a shiny dashboard with it as a number to replace the project manager. What could possibly go wrong?