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AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

chatterhead.bearblog.dev

321–330 of 379 posts

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

#321
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly convinced JIRA can be managed by a well crafted expert system.

I’d prefer JIRA got replaced by an AI system tho

Well an expert system is an AI system. It's "true" AI in the sense it's not solving a constraint optimization problem, but rather querying a knowledge database like a human might do.

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

#322
post #288

Ask yourself: In your day job, how much “management” of your work do you do for yourself? If your answer is “I mostly manage myself”, then your manager has already vacated the role we’re talking about automating with AÍ. You will experience this new AI manager as a set of tools to help you get your work done. If your answer is “I am frequently, directly managed” then your manager will be replaced by software that is…

Development is likely a bad example.

Consider a grocery store. I'm related to someone who worked grocery in the 90s. There was a job called a Merchandiser that would fly to every store in a region, consult with the store to help them with their ordering, and provide guidance with product placement.

Their job was nearly entirely replaceable with good algorithms and camera enforcement. It could have been replaced with a computer, a camera, and three people in the home office that functioned as a panopticon.

That is how AI replaces middle management.

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

#323
post #219

I worked for a large grocery store chain between 2004 and 2010, there the AI had already taken over. Though we didn't call it an AI, just 'the system'. The system was able to procure goods with stunning accuracy. Sometimes it even surprised us. For example: we'd receive a much higher number of BBQ meat than typical, only to realise it was going to be amazing weather the coming days. The system was also making schedul…

Sounds very much like a lot of predictive analytics places like walmart do. Walmart has spent hundreds of millions on solving the problem of getting stuff into stores just before it's needed, and some of their work on weather modeling, yearly holiday predictive impact, etc is very interesting, and just a bit scary.

Walmart likely had data on which states were covid baby boom states and which ones were baby bust states well before any of the rest of us had even a sliver of an idea how fertility would play out during the lockdowns.

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

#324

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’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…

Except that most of the time you won't even know what metrics it is making judgements on, and neither will most of the people who made the model

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

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Citations needed I come to that at this end. I will start by giving the at-will contract example of poor US worker protection. Those at-will contract are not contracts. They describe in great lengths that you don't have any relationship with your employer. No string attach! Great, I wonder who benefit more from it? That has deep consequences, and the result is when I work in the US i feel a Damocles sword upon me,…

The PPP adjustment is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Real (non-PPP adjusted) GDP per capita in the US is ~50% higher than France's.

Correct. In the context of productivity, I think a 'per hour' metric is more appropriate.

France and western Europe in general have comprehensive social nets that will allow a larger part of the population to be idle/unemployed. A GDP per capita will be lower for all those places.

I think we don't really care if a country is deciding to support non-productive citizen. Here, we want to compare the productivity of people who do work. And that the 'per hour' metric I choose for that.

Looking at the 'per capita' ranking, you see a lot of tax haven like cayman islands, Bermuda or Macau that are weeded out in the per hours view.

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

#326

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.

On how many established industries can you wake up tomorrow and start a competing company?

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

#327

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…

>The hardest thing about management is managing people, who are generally self-centered, opinionated, and wishing they were doing something else. How, specifically, will AI be better at that than humans?

Simple: fire the ones who don't obey orders, while the parent firm lobbies for elevated unemployment rates to discipline workers.

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

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know what they mean, and it is an incorrect assessment with a great bias towards their own interests. The boss is another role. You can be a boss. Why not? Ah, it entails risks also: paying bills, managing, taking decisions, risk of going bankrupt... so when most people talk about expoitation they do not talk about the other side of things so that their complaints look legit. Also, working in an already setup envir…

Interesting, you only cover the options that exist in the current paradigm around a advanced economy where there are plenty of individual options that you are right most people don't explore. The weakness from my perspective in your argument is that the current economic structure you are describing and which we are living in, is by its very nature exploitative. It has deep historical roots in destroying any other means of sustenance beyond what the system controlled. Cultivatable land was stolen, captured and monopolized at the expense of those relying on those sytems. Means of sustenance have been continually destroyed or over exploited such as the buffalo in the States, the swamps drained and turned to farmland everywhere, seasonal water sources captured and guarded everywhere, jungles burned or cut down through out Asia and South America. This direct exploitation of communal resources by groups of people against other groups of for economic gain and control has forced people who did choose a different form of life is directly exploitative. This led to Nomads everywhere given "incentives" everywhere to settle down and become part of the larger economic system and culture, native american boarding houses in both US and CA that led to the mass deaths of thousands of Native children. This has led to loss of culture, languages, and peoples all over the world. When the larger system doesn't approve the smaller systems disappear. Yes we have options in the current economic system but we have no options outside of it.

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

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am talking about concrete examples and consequent trend. Uber is fiddling with price hikes and "high demand areas" to make drivers work more. Yandex.Taxi in Russia gives drivers "let's go home" button to catch a ride towards their home, but before driver hits that button Yandex will give them a ride in the opposite direction - to increase total mileage. Those are just known facts, and there are lots less researched…

> but before driver hits that button Yandex will give them a ride in the opposite direction - to increase total mileage

Isn't that good for the driver?

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

#330
post #288

Ask yourself: In your day job, how much “management” of your work do you do for yourself? If your answer is “I mostly manage myself”, then your manager has already vacated the role we’re talking about automating with AÍ. You will experience this new AI manager as a set of tools to help you get your work done. If your answer is “I am frequently, directly managed” then your manager will be replaced by software that is…

Development is likely a bad example. Consider a grocery store. I'm related to someone who worked grocery in the 90s. There was a job called a Merchandiser that would fly to every store in a region, consult with the store to help them with their ordering, and provide guidance with product placement. Their job was nearly entirely replaceable with good algorithms and camera enforcement. It could have been replaced with…

> Development is likely a bad example.

Does “development” refer to something in my comment or something else? (Neither my comment nor the original post refer to “Development”.)

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