Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers

chatterhead.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 379 posts

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

#331

Post by marcosdumay »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #171
byw wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm generally curious if there are any numbers about this. Something like managers per employees over the decades.

Peter Drucker argued (with data) in the late 90s that the entire edifice of computing had yet to return a total positive return on business as a whole. basically claiming that if one subtracts total cost including things like the brain drain of minds which would normally funnel into advanced business and management schools to comp sci programs, and the tendency for advances in individual firms' efficiencies to cross…

> which is not returned even equally as improved services and goods

It's not returned in revenue. Nobody has even the faintest idea about what is the effect on non-consolidated services and goods.

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

#332

Post by qualudeheart »

jesuscript wrote: post #191
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’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…

That is why you must get rich with crypto or startups before the AI panopticon comes for you. Become who you are. Free yourself from capitalism.

That’s the first step.

That is to say, you become a super-human; someone who cannt be financially pressured into serfdom.

The AI panopticon, once it is unleashed, will scan your mind, read all your thoughts, and extract all your emotions and goals. Only the wealty will be able to afford freedom ftom the panopticon.

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

#333

Post by marcosdumay »

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'…

Oh, ok. If you go with the definition that says that AI is what tries to solve any problem that is still not solved well enough to be useful, then yes, useful software doesn't have it.

AI is a pretty useless name, anyway. Since no two people will agree on its meaning.

Anyway, I doubt people tagged what products are most sold on good weather. That's the kind of thing that is almost always discovered by statistic analysis. (We call some statistic analysis "machine learning", while others that do the exact same thing we don't.)

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

#334

Post by qualudeheart »

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…

Nothing human makes it out of the near future. Can what’s playing you make it to level two?

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

#335

Post by asdff »

trashtester wrote: post #296
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…

> 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. For a traditional bar, I agree. In places where the "bar" is not the primary attraction, such as sports arenas, concert halls or even some types of night clubs, the bar may be just a bottleneck where you may have t…

Is the bespoke robot with a service contract from a for profit company cheaper than someone you are paying $12/hr? That's the equation here. Lines are long, but that just means you have to pay fewer bartenders, and people will still wait in line anyway. Sometimes these venues aren't even mixing drinks already. They might have cocktails premixed next to the beer taps.

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

#336

Post by asdff »

bluGill wrote: post #312
trashtester wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. For a traditional bar, I agree. In places where the "bar" is not the primary attraction, such as sports arenas, concert halls or even some types of night clubs, the bar may be just a bottleneck where you may have t…

In a traditional bar the robot will mix drinks, while the bar tender talks. A few bartenders have mixing the drink part of their act, but the rest don't need to pour drinks. Science fiction had long suggested bartenders have a degree in psychology or some such field as realistically that is what they are, just not paid / trained like the medical profession it is

The robot will probably pour you a far less boozy well drink though

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

#337

Post by _oghd »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #268
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…

I’m always amused by these takes because they are implicitly submissive. It only makes sense if you posit the world as some kind of omnipotent power structure imposing things on an other powerless strata. I think Americans are drawn to these ideas because they have a somewhat individualistic culture. Meanwhile society is fundamentally built on exchange and community. Strictly antisocial structures like the one you de…

Deleuze has a good really short essay called Postscript on Societies of Control[1] on the machinic nature of capitalism.

maybe we are saying the same thing, and I absolutely agree that Americans have a fundamentally individualist viewpoint.

however I still see your argument as being rooting in human perspective. capitalism is a human institution as much as our human body is a cellular institution. apoptosis is as fundamental to a functioning human body as exploitative labor relations are to capital.

I don't see it as submissive because in a control society, governed by computers and machine learning models, humans are in fact freed in a certain way, channeled toward production. this is coupled with ideology which is already present to make it feel less alienating, even preferable.

however capital is far from dead. and whatever human individual or institutional churning happens in the next 30 years due to tech I don't see having a significant impact.

1. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-posts...

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

#338

Post by marcosdumay »

rowanajmarshall wrote: post #275
goodpoint wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. The recommendation engine is working correctly, and people who bought a kitchen table are more likely to buy another one compared to buying a completely unrelated item.

Maybe I don't know enough about recommendation systems, but surely not? If I buy a kitchen table, in my demographic (mid-20s in rented accommodation) it's because I moved into a new flat, or my existing table broke. In either case, buying a new table actually marks the start of a long period where I won't be buying any new tables, and every day from then onwards I'm slightly more likely to buy a table.

As far as I know, buying a kitchen table is so rare that the unlikely possibility that you return it, it breaks, or you are a "serial mover" that rents homes for small times can be enough to make the odds of somebody that just brought a table buying another higher than some random person.

Unless you have some aggregated market data, you don't know either. Up to very recently, nobody knew if the likelihood increased or not. Nowadays a few people are able to discover it, but it doesn't look like they bothered to.

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

#339

Post by pessimizer »

monkeydust wrote: post #103

I think the broad consensus was AI would replace Manual, Knowledge and Creative workers in that order. Seems to be trending the other way. Recently seen more tele-operational solutions in robotics space to replace or compliment manual labour. There seems to be something to this where full automation is not feasible or where it fails and needs recovery.

> Seems to be trending the other way.

Their order never made any sense anyway. Manual laborers are doing the most complicated, varied, movements optimized over time. Every new movement for a robot requires more mechanical creativity and introduces more fragility. Knowledge and creative workers click on things and type stuff.

Manual workers are expected to maintain themselves, generally don't get any health insurance, and if they get damaged are expected to repair themselves or be replaced. Complicated machines break down and require specialized maintenance and repair from highly skilled professionals. You can also pay knowledge and creative workers trash, but their output is very slow compared to the machines that will replace them.

Manual workers can be abused and ignored, and if they roll their eyes about it, fired without cause. If you have a robot, that is now the center of your business, and if the robot isn't happy, no one is happy. Knowledge and creative workers are more likely to kick up a stink when abused.

Manual workers and robots complement each other, raising productivity. As knowledge workers and creatives start working with ML tools instead of Creative Suite and MS Office, it will gradually become harder and harder to justify why the robots need the artist's help; you can be a good photographer by taking a good photograph, or you can be a good photographer by traveling to interesting places, taking 1000 photographs, and choosing the one you like best. ML gives us the analog of the latter case for free.

It really comes down to the fact that maintaining complicated machinery (to replace a manual worker) is a lot more expensive than maintaining a bunch of commodity servers (to replace a knowledge worker.)

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

#340

Post by aaroninsf »

I think the one-sentence version of this thesis is much more interesting and true than the specific build out:

"AI" will very obviously continue to make inroads into traditional human knowledge-work and adjacent domains, automating roles and (for some metrics) outperforming humans.

The lemmas are playing out in too many domains to track any longer already: there will be blowback largely defined by intentional and unintentional confusion and misplaced identification of root problems; and by chaos where historic structures (legal ethical and otherwise) which were reasonable when the only agents exhibiting agency were human, now have to contend with a spectrum of collaborative entities mixing individuals, communities, and "AI" of all kinds.

"Middle management" is a misnomer, but the premise is reasonable, that which can be quantified will be optimized.

As noted ITT what and how quantification occurs and whether that tracks "reality" (or traditional fictions at least) remains to be seen.

My own take on that is that what we will mostly see is evolutionary pressure weeding out unviable failures, accommodating for a while at least midling failures, and a slow quiet creep towards deeper and more pervasively "correct" solutions,

all trending inexorably towards even less and more existential challenges at both the philosophical and societal level, and the basic one defined by the paperclip peril of the Alignment Problem.

I am unsurprised that certain domains (like effective definition of and execution of a business plan through an organization made of non-fungible humans) will prove exceedingly hard to fully capture.

But I am now regularly surprised by ice-shelf-break level dramatic gains in domains that seemed until recently equally unassailable.

The ingenue in this domain for me is Whisper. It's just... solved that problem for good, it seems.

Post reply on HN