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Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

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Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#141

Post by rabidonrails »

thepasswordis wrote: post #124
philipjoubert wrote: post #35

As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine? The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.

>As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine? People in western countries find things like sweatshops to be objectionable. >The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made. People in western countries are well aware of how their shirts are made, and don't like it, and try to avoid it when possibl…

I'm not sure what data you're using to prove this but it seems like many of the largest brands in the US are still using sweatshop labor [1]. Many still have no idea of what's going on in Xinjiang [2]

1. https://yoursustainableguide.com/brands-that-use-sweatshops/ 2. https://whatishappeninginxinjiang.com/brands-linked-to-xinji...

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#142

Post by soerxpso »

ren_engineer wrote: post #125
infecto wrote: post #56

The only thing truly embarrassing is that nobody at YC advised them that this ad is 1) terribly amateur and 2) has the chance to look extremely bad. Did not advise and in fact published to their feed. Weird optics, I am not familiar with what I presume to be Indian factories, other than the wild lack of safety (thanks youtube) but I cannot see how this video does anything positive. As for the product itself I don't t…

saw someone point out how they could have framed it as a way to reward good workers, but instead they showed how they can go after people underperforming. Just bad framing and shows how out of touch they are

Out of touch? The people offended by this are not their target customers. I imagine there are far fewer managers sitting around thinking, "I need a way to identify my good workers so I can reward them" than managers thinking, "I need a way to tell when my workers are not working."

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#143

Post by solardev »

ryandrake wrote: post #118
solardev wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've spent 32.8 seconds urinating this shift, 1.3 seconds longer than average. Your bonus has been reduced until performance meets standards. At Amazon, the customer comes first! Congratulations! This week your urination schedule has improved. Enjoy a Kindle credit on us, good for any ebook license under $2.99. At Amazon, our partners come first!

I wish entrepreneurs would stop trying to make Manna[1] a reality. It's supposed to be a dystopia, people. Stop trying to create it! 1: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Fun story, thanks for sharing! Seems pretty inevitable... the Elon Musks of the world would love this. Luxury living for the 1%, fully automated indentured servitude for the rest of us.

But at least we'll have nice text to speech in the headsets, hopefully.

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#144

Post by rabidonrails »

dttze wrote: post #115
dang wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's deeply untrue and unfair, and the fact that you've reached back 12 years to find an example, when YC has funded thousands of startups since then, is evidence against what you're saying. YC has turned down many startups because they didn't think what the product was doing was right, and it has defunded and banned startups for ethical reasons over the years. It's not your fault that you didn't know this, since n…

YC is funding weapon manufacturers lol. Where are the ethics there?

This is a strange view.

Weapons development is at best helpful as it hopefully provides a deterrent to nefarious actors and at worst protects our interest as Americans if someone caused us to move beyond weapons as a "deterrent."

Pretending like national defense and development of weapons is a bad thing is hiding your head in sand and pretending that there's nobody that wants to hurt you.

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#145

Post by Planktonne »

danpalmer wrote: post #26

This sort of performance management is unfortunately necessary. The problem is that we need tools for it to be built by people who can empathise with those subjected to them, and who want to do the right thing, and not these sorts of folks who are too immature and inexperienced to get it right. My previous company ran a warehouse and there was a clear bell curve of productivity. Most people were fine, some were excel…

The video shows two people whose full-time job is watching an automated dashboard and who have failed to spot an issue for at least a month.

Quite apart from anything else, this isn't a good argument that this type of performance management is necessary, it's a great argument for firing all the managers in that factory.

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#146

Post by ryandrake »

solardev wrote: post #143
ryandrake wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish entrepreneurs would stop trying to make Manna[1] a reality. It's supposed to be a dystopia, people. Stop trying to create it! 1: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Fun story, thanks for sharing! Seems pretty inevitable... the Elon Musks of the world would love this. Luxury living for the 1%, fully automated indentured servitude for the rest of us. But at least we'll have nice text to speech in the headsets, hopefully.

Kind of like the movie Elysium but without the space station. Somehow, making dystopias into reality seems like a sort of weird moral imperative to a lot of tech people. I guess techies (wrongly) think that they'll somehow end up on the side of the 1%.

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#147

Post by dttze »

rabidonrails wrote: post #144
dttze wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC is funding weapon manufacturers lol. Where are the ethics there?

This is a strange view. Weapons development is at best helpful as it hopefully provides a deterrent to nefarious actors and at worst protects our interest as Americans if someone caused us to move beyond weapons as a "deterrent." Pretending like national defense and development of weapons is a bad thing is hiding your head in sand and pretending that there's nobody that wants to hurt you.

> protects our interest as Americans

Whose? Not mine.

To me, yours is the strange viewpoint. We have nukes and a massive air force. That is the bulk of the deterrence. Use good statesmanship and diplomacy and that covers the rest. Anything else being developed is for political suppression or fueling regional wars and imperial bullshit.

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#148

Post by [deleted] »

yogurt-male wrote: post #49
2099miles wrote: post #10

Tbh this isn’t that crazy. If you hire someone to do their job outputting 10 items per hour and that number is reasonable because a bunch of other workers you hired for the same job are doing it and 1 guy hits 1 per hour then that guys shouldn’t be doing that job. The outrage should be focused on the absolute meme of their ad video cuz they were like “lets literally have a convo with an individual but refer to them a…

Looking for 10x discrepancies is not how this will be used, and you know it. Adoption of this sort of tech is going to lead to Amazon "peeing in bottles" situations. It's wild how much faith people have in the ethics of business owners, especially the ultra-wealthy.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#149

Post by solumos »

black_puppydog wrote: post #42
solumos wrote: post #37

Is it dystopian, or is it just real-time performance monitoring poorly marketed by inexperienced founders? There are tools like this for tracking git commits and velocity (that I’ve been on the receiving end of). It probably makes less sense in that context, but if your job is a repetitive task, I don’t think it’s necessarily abuse or dystopian to track it. Monitoring bottlenecks isn’t a bad thing. They probably coul…

You mean if they marketed it differently, managers would magically stop using it exactly the way it was advertised?

Assuming that this comment is made in good faith — I doubt that they have much usage currently. Better marketing would show how managers could use this tool to better support their staff rather than scolding them.

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#150

Post by _DeadFred_ »

trunch wrote: post #33
2099miles wrote: post #10

Tbh this isn’t that crazy. If you hire someone to do their job outputting 10 items per hour and that number is reasonable because a bunch of other workers you hired for the same job are doing it and 1 guy hits 1 per hour then that guys shouldn’t be doing that job. The outrage should be focused on the absolute meme of their ad video cuz they were like “lets literally have a convo with an individual but refer to them a…

Because this will definitely be used only to innocently tell off people doing 1/10 the work of everyone else, and not micromanage and hound people to increasingly unrealistic standards in already desperate conditions. Safe to say you aren't in any position where every move you make will be watched by AI and analysed for faults so that your boss can scream at you more efficiently whenever you don't meet standards for…

It's also dumb from a factory prospective. Our factories did time studies to understand things. What we learned:

Certain lines are primarily made up of barely functioning older people. No one else sticks around in those jobs. Think barely functioning alcoholic or recovering alcoholics that have nothing. However we would also get a few 18 year olds with no idea how jobs/work works and or zero accountability (they just ghost jobs).

From the numbers we should want to build our processes around the high performers. But we can't expand our base of high performers AND they are the most likely to just disappear and not easily have their productivity replaced.

So yes, it was correct that 10% of our people outperformed by 10X, and yes, it was smart to not try to improve that but to understand reality.

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