71–80 of 168 posts
[dupe] Lots of discussion earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170850
Not a dupe. The last thread was just someone drawing attention to what they saw. This thread is in response to an investigative piece by 404 Media.
"Optifye.ai, launched by Duke University computer science students Baid and Mohta, is backed by Y Combinator, according to the company’s site. On their Y Combinator company profile, they write that both of their families run manufacturing plants, where they’ve been exposed to factory working conditions since they were children. “I've been around assembly lines for as long as I can remember,” Baid wrote. Mohta wrote,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually assume that this tech will almost immediately be used worse than in the video skit. If anything, I think they're unaware or sugar-coating it, but not doing a great PR job of that for US audiences.
I don't understand how you could come to that conclusion, they are referring to a sweatshop employee by a number and humiliating him for bad performance to the audience. How much more explicit would their demo have to be in order for you to believe they understand how their tech will be used? Edit: They know exactly what they are doing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175023#43176516
(Though, one of my snap judgments is that this is probably worse than they realize, over 0.6 probability, unless they're far into their sales meetings, or have a lot of world experience. The impression in the video is that they're imagining a class-based dynamic, with someone from a lower class than them being a lazy and unmotivated problem worker, and how they think is culturally appropriate to interact. That might actually be what they envision. But we have enough analogous examples, for decades, to assume that many customers will use it even worse. And with interaction flavors that are more culturally familiar and recognizable to us in the US.)
Edit: I didn't see your edit link when I responded. Yes, I think that link fits my first impression. I'll stand by my position that the condemning comments have been done enough, and that some other nuance and alternate interpretations might apply, and are worth mentioning, for this case and in general.
Here is a painful truth that I would venture that 95%+ of people don't know. In fact when I learned it, removing this small block of knowledge from my head toppled an entire ideological castle I had lived in until that point. Low wage labor is not very valuable at all, and has very low margins on it. The gap between "profitable worker" and "unprofitable worker" is the absolute smallest at the bottom. These workers ke…
Spare me your BS.
I'm shocked that anyone here is confused as to why this is controversial, to use a popular twitter phrase they were completely "mask off" on what they intended their tech to be used for. The demo was for a garment manufacturing sweatshop in which they identified a slow employee, called him by a number, and humiliated him, stopping just short of recommending a "corrective action". This easily could have been spun in a…
FWIW, I think people are getting confused because this is framed as a technology story, not a story about the inhumane conditions in sweatshops. I feel like this framing is common in a lot of news stories (big tech being the villain du jour), and is unhelpful because it causes folks who otherwise agree with each other to fixate on the "is technology bad or is it neutral" angle, which gets in the way of any actual agr…
This is exactly why we need regulations that prohibit this. The upcoming EU regulations [0] seem to at least partially cover this, as employment is one of the high risk categories for AI systems. What that means in detail is still to be seen, but at least the groundwork is already there. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152937
Will those regulations help with non-AI version of the same? If you want plot a worker's performance graphs (and fire them for underperformance), you don't need any AI or vision or even a computer, just a supervisor who manually counts the workers' outputs. "Hey number 17, how come you made only has 10 boxes this morning, while number 16's has made 25 boxes already. Work harder!" Unlike AI stuff, it will only be dail…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When anyone argues that Engineering majors shouldn't have to take all those pesky electives and get at least a basic grounding in Ethics and the Humanities, we can point to this startup as a potential consequence.
Has any of those classes ever been actually useful for this kind of thing though? The closest classes I took could be summarized as: * Snowden: good or bad? * Poor people should try enjoying rich-people hobbies! * Does it belong in a museum, or should it be returned to the descendants of the people it was taken from? (actually a very interesting class)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand how you could come to that conclusion, they are referring to a sweatshop employee by a number and humiliating him for bad performance to the audience. How much more explicit would their demo have to be in order for you to believe they understand how their tech will be used? Edit: They know exactly what they are doing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175023#43176516
I don't mean to disagree with you. I have my own snap judgments, but trying to temper them at the moment. When I commented, I thought there was already more than enough people piling on to condemn, so I thought I should take a deep breath, and make some complementary points. (Though, one of my snap judgments is that this is probably worse than they realize, over 0.6 probability, unless they're far into their sales me…
Here is a painful truth that I would venture that 95%+ of people don't know. In fact when I learned it, removing this small block of knowledge from my head toppled an entire ideological castle I had lived in until that point. Low wage labor is not very valuable at all, and has very low margins on it. The gap between "profitable worker" and "unprofitable worker" is the absolute smallest at the bottom. These workers ke…
Those poor bosses, they’re employing people that are barely making them any profit, purely out of the goodness in their hearts. Spare me your BS.
I won't shed any tears for capital either, but pretending they're going to operate a charity out of the goodnesses of their hearts and not a business that generates profit is not a winning strategy to get them to socialize the means of production.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
well the iPhones won't make themselves
I was wondering how many humans still touch an iPhone during it's production in a Foxconn factory. Looking at this 2023 article[0], a lot. 35000 workers on three factories in India, solely dedicated to produce recent gen iPhones, with depcting of manual assembly down to screwing parts. I was expecting they automatized a lot more. https://restofworld.org/2023/foxconn-india-iphone-factory/