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AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

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Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

#241

Post by germandiago »

SergeAx wrote: post #222
snowwrestler wrote: post #39

What 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 are right and this is bad news, because AI middle management is still inevitable. Currenlty, AI more or less manages taxi drivers in different places around the world, also telesupport personnel and other positions like those. Every time it degrades to orwellian level of sick incentives and pure exploitation. And things will get worse, because it allows to maximize profits.

So from your writing I can extract: profit is bad and incentives to work are bad, no matter the improvement on the service or if people do it bc they found it an option?

If you consider a job as exploitation, in the free world you can find another job, right? That is what I do: I will not work in what I think it is bad.

But in my case at least that job should be very bad by all measures, bc there is no worst thing for me than getting social benefits just because a job was "too bad", "too exploited" or "too hard".

All in all, I do not think driving taxis has something to do with exploitation.

Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

#242

Post by AussieWog93 »

jesuscript wrote: post #231
AussieWog93 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” On the flip side, the companies that embodied this ethos were disrupted out of existence over the course of decades, to the point where IBM ran out of customers and sold off their declining hardware business. Any damage this does in the short-term will self correct in 30 years.

Sure, but if you measure 30 years, let’s say starting at 20 for a young adult - that all the way until they are 50 they will have to deal with this. We as a society are basically saying at least one generation of people are a lost generation. Like all the people that slaved during Industrialization without workers protection or quality of life fixes, or all the millions that died in WW1/2 because we couldn’t understa…

Not saying you're wrong[1], but if it weren't AI it'd be something else.

Attempting to solve really hairy problems with a simple, universally applicable solution is a tale as old as time.

[1] Although I suspect a sea of AI-generated bullshit metrics would be closer in impact to outsourcing/insourcing cycles or whatever the hell we've allowed HR to become than WW2.

Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

#243

Post by wruza »

snowwrestler wrote: post #39

What 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…

How is it going to convince Jack to switch his shift and come in to cover open on Sunday

How does google convince you to provide a “backup” phone number? Or that its search results and recommendations are correct? Or that you align with PlayStore’s rules to not be banned?

Don’t people wish something else? If it is not better than a fellow human, why don’t we have other, humane services dominating the market?

Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

#244

Post by pasquinelli »

germandiago wrote: post #241
SergeAx wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right and this is bad news, because AI middle management is still inevitable. Currenlty, AI more or less manages taxi drivers in different places around the world, also telesupport personnel and other positions like those. Every time it degrades to orwellian level of sick incentives and pure exploitation. And things will get worse, because it allows to maximize profits.

So from your writing I can extract: profit is bad and incentives to work are bad, no matter the improvement on the service or if people do it bc they found it an option? If you consider a job as exploitation, in the free world you can find another job, right? That is what I do: I will not work in what I think it is bad. But in my case at least that job should be very bad by all measures, bc there is no worst thing fo…

the boss makes more off your work than you do, that's what people mean by exploitation when they're talking about work.

Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

#245

Post by hectorlorenzo »

wefarrell wrote: post #45

This reminds me of an argument I got into at a bar with someone who claimed robots would inevitably replace bartenders. I took the view that bartenders would be the last occupation to be replaced by robots because if the goal was to minimize the cost to consume alcohol people wouldn't be coming to bars in the first place. There's a misconception that jobs with higher pay and more prestige will be the last to be repla…

Wouldn't upper management be in charge of taking the decision of replacing upper management with AI? Or is this only applicable to small companies (or workers' cooperatives) that had access to these functions from their foundation?

Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

#246

Post by quickthrower2 »

cachvico wrote: post #235
ketzo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why devoid of AI? Not being combative here, genuinely curious Perhaps devoid of machine learning, given the year, but even that seems unlikely if the anecdote is true. If predicting and planning outcomes and with previous data is not some form of AI, what is? Agreed on the valuable ERP thing, though. There’s a reason SAP is as expensive as it is.

> If predicting and planning outcomes and with previous data is not some form of AI, what is? Algorithmic forecasting. If you squint really hard, the entirety of computer science falls under "AI". But practically speaking, today AI refers to ML. It's quite possible a savvy programmer integrated the weather forecast to the ERP, with specific products tagged as relevant to a sunny (or wet) outlook. That's not AI, that'…

You need a demand forecast for the weather so at least stats was used. Maybe linear regression?

Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

#247

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #240
jesuscript wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How’s AI going to do that better than a fellow human? It will create metrics that will formalize a new paradigm. You know that arbitrary number in your bank account that defines you, that number on your report card, that rating on an Amazon review, that number that’s defining global inflation, that metric that measures interest rate, that number of hours you work … The fucking lines of code, number of commits, points…

Agreed. I think people warning of an esoteric singularity AI will be wrong. It won't even be called an AI perhaps, it will be little agents that try to quantify everything. Data analysts as prostitutes of special interest will set up metrics so that management can nudge workers towards a certain direction. In the vast majority of cases it will be metrics to quantify individual productivity. This then becomes a new re…

Competition is going to love predictable competitors.

Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

#248

Post by lodovic »

andrewjl wrote: post #83
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm an AI maximalist and I don't see AI "management" in a 1:1 fashion happening. However I can see some orthogonal scenario where an "AI" run company - whatever that means in the future - manages a bunch of contracts as a middleman/market maker, thus obviating middle management altogether and making it a world of freelancers. So it could go that way...

> However I can see some orthogonal scenario where an "AI" run company I don't think this can be done sustainably. AI can definitely run a company's operations, especially at scale. A fully AI-run company opens itself up to arbitrage of various sorts.

The problem with a fully AI run company is that it needs reliable measurements to base its decisions on. An AI overlord managing a company would typically have some work to complete, would hire people based on the required qualifications (an API call to a temp agency), and assign tasks to employees based on the work to be done. (ofcourse, it has to figure out the workflows first. But once the AI has figured out what exactly needs to be done, I doubt many humans will be involved)

To manage the work effectively, would require that all assigned tasks can be verified and ranked in quality of work. Otherwise some employees could easily do nothing or a lousy job all day, and just enter into the system that all their work has been done successfully. How would the system know who is slacking? Perhaps if we remove all privacy through computer vision, all kinds of sensors, and massive amounts of data entry. But this would still not be comparable to a manager taking a stroll through the employees and talking to people. I really can't see AI running a company at this time. It requires too much input and still won't be able to make reliable decisions.

Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

#249

Post by pjc50 »

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #247
raxxorraxor wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I think people warning of an esoteric singularity AI will be wrong. It won't even be called an AI perhaps, it will be little agents that try to quantify everything. Data analysts as prostitutes of special interest will set up metrics so that management can nudge workers towards a certain direction. In the vast majority of cases it will be metrics to quantify individual productivity. This then becomes a new re…

Competition is going to love predictable competitors.

We see how this plays out already in search: you need a surprisingly large human staff to manage the adversarial side. If "the algorithm" is predictably gameable, then malicious actors will take the value; so it needs to be constantly adjusted to keep ahead of them.

Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

#250

Post by dmurray »

jstx1 wrote: post #167
largepeepee wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that you're mixing up Watson the jeopardy bot with Deep Blue the chess bot.

No, he's reasoning by analogy. Read it as "Watson isn't so much a general trivia AI", etc.
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