Another of these articles. Middle management is mostly about managing people, not taking decisions. The decisions MMs can make are extremely limited. They are hired so that the top management doesn't have to deal with all these pesky employees.
AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
201–210 of 379 posts
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How, specifically, will AI be better at that than humans? AI cannot even reliably autocorrect this comment as I’m typing it. How is it going to convince Jack to switch his shift and come in to cover open on Sunday because Jill’s sister was in a car accident and Jill is watching her niece? How’s AI going to do that better than a fellow human? This is a solved problem by using surge pricing. It's a widespread practic…
> This is a solved problem by using surge pricing. It's a widespread practice with contractors today. This solves the problem for situations where you have a large pool of workers with elastic hours for a job which requires effectively zero training... which is basically Uber, food delivery, and not much else. Even something as entry-level as a Starbucks barista you can't just pull a random person off the street and…
I've reviewed pitch decks and talked to founders of at least half a dozen companies aiming to provide pooling of workers with elastic hours across employers.
Including for hospitality, which has extremely high rates of attrition, and so while you can't just pull a random person off the street you can often pull a random person with experience from the same or similar chain from a database if you need urgent cover.
Reason I think at least some of those types of companies will make it is that I used to work on CRMs for hospitality, and saw the amount of staff moving back and forth between venues and different companies on our client list.
It won't replace middle management, but it may well reduce the numbers in larger chains.
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#203Just speaking as a student of Arendt, the most dangerous thing in the world is a rich country with suddenly unemployed middle managers. There's a straight up reason we keep those sociopaths busy.
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#204Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#205What does chess have in common with retail middle management? As someone who has managed a retail store and played chess, I can confidently answer: nothing. Remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy? And then IBM saturated the airwaves with ads about how Watson was going to revolutionize industries like energy and health care? Notice how we don’t see those ads anymore? It’s because winning Jeopardy has nothi…
> What does chess have in common with retail middle management? Sacrificing pawns is an accepted practice? :)
also, play a castling on the board to protect the king|ceo (in German we actually use the word 'rochade'=castling commonly for lateral movements in management and politics)
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#206This is a poorly reasoned or at least a poorly articulated essay. AI to this point is built to optimize some objective function. What is that function with respect to middle management? Some sort of mathematical expression would be interesting but even a plain-English expression would certainly be helpful. And what exactly are the inputs and output? I guess the inputs could be a roster of employees along with some pe…
If someone can design a company structure where you decouple your employees from their superiors entirely, it'll be inhuman but I bet there will be people who will try. The AI hype is just so strong.
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can imagine it can be a fintech opportunity. An AI that automatically performs a credit check behind the scene and lend you the money in advance, probably money in your account in seconds. It's not too hard actually.
This is different from a pay day loan how exactly? I have bank app on my phone which claims that I can get an up to 35k loan in minutes
You’re describing an interest bearing loan. This is more like being able to withdraw money that you already earned, you just don’t have it because it’s not the 25th of the month yet.
Floatpays in the latest YC batch is one of these.
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#208Last 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…
That only works in scenarios where labor is fungible, like logo design. Try telling a key employee all that stuff, you'll get told you can do it yourself.
Of course.
Perhaps it is wrong to talk about middle management being replaced by AI. It seems that AI as of now is not very inventive. It is a clever mash-up of things that were already done by humans. But most employees just do that. They learn from others in school, college or on the job how to do things in their profession and then employ what they have learned. If they use a computer to execute then actually nothing stops them from being replaced by the computer itself.
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#209What does chess have in common with retail middle management? As someone who has managed a retail store and played chess, I can confidently answer: nothing. Remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy? And then IBM saturated the airwaves with ads about how Watson was going to revolutionize industries like energy and health care? Notice how we don’t see those ads anymore? It’s because winning Jeopardy has nothi…
AI could do the bit where it harasses people to see what they are working on, what progress they have made, etc. Like a metronome, it could gather that info, to allow the indispensable, senior management to keep an eye on things - got to get those metrics. AI can keep itself busy trying to figure out ways to get that information without being a pest - it could be sending emails for updates, or by direct monitoring of the employees' machines.
Coding tomorrow's dystopia - today!
PS, it could also be infinitely patient listening to people's complaints! That would make people happier!
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#210What does chess have in common with retail middle management? As someone who has managed a retail store and played chess, I can confidently answer: nothing. Remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy? And then IBM saturated the airwaves with ads about how Watson was going to revolutionize industries like energy and health care? Notice how we don’t see those ads anymore? It’s because winning Jeopardy has nothi…
you could probably use the managers salary to hire another floor employee to avoid such gaps in your particular example
but i think in general you are correct, but in reality i suspect many (but not all) managers dont actually provide any value, some even provide negative value