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'Hey Number 17 '

404media.co

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Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#91

Post by adolph »

In case someone hasn't read it, here is a link to Marshal Brain's "Mana" which walks the reader through the creation of a dystopia through worker monitoring/feedback systems called Mana. In Brain's US-centric vision, this system is first deployed in a fast-food restaurant.

Edit: to add a discordance btw Mana and Optifye.ai's vision, for 404 and Optifye, the tool is used by managers to browbeat workers; for Mana, the managers were among the first to go. Why bother with a human to say “You haven’t hit your hourly output . . . this is really bad!”?

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

   The employees were told exactly what to do, and they did it quite happily. It was a major relief actually, because the software told them precisely what to do step by step.
  
  For example, when Jane entered the restroom, Manna used a simple position tracking system built into her headset to know that she had arrived. Manna then told her the first step.
  
  Manna: “Place the ‘wet floor’ warning cone outside the door please.”
  
  When Jane completed the task, she would speak the word “OK” into her headset and Manna moved to the next step in the restroom cleaning procedure.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#92

Post by neilv »

some_random wrote: post #78
neilv wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have an incredible amount of respect for you for that, most of the time it's the right thing to do. However, I would encourage you to tune that reflex here since as the other user I linked to previously found, all the founders come from families that run sweatshops that they have had access to from a young age. They are imagining nothing, this is at best their actual views of the world and how it should work and at…

I should add that, re-reading my initial comments, in light of some of the information I didn't have before, I see how some of my comments now miss the mark. I think the comments are still valid for general situations, and I'll leave them without edits or clarification. I just wish I'd picked better timing to mention them.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#93

Post by [deleted] »

causal wrote: post #28
pzmarzly wrote: post #22

I know some people working in low-cost sweatshops, where human labour is cheaper than automation, everyone is told they can be replaced within days, and the few machines you may find are usually older than the employees (or better yet, contractors) operating them. Every sweatshop like that has high turnover rates, and micromanaging bosses that... let's say make sure these rates don't fall. If these bosses are the tar…

Tools like this exist because of people who don't take Goodhart's law seriously. Turn efficiency into a convenient metric, target that metric, and next thing you know problems keep cropping up despite your efficiency numbers being so high!

[deleted]

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#94

Post by Workaccount2 »

scarfaceneo wrote: post #74
Workaccount2 wrote: post #65

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.

Here's the rub though, you employ these exact same calculations in your day to day life. It's something that when broken down into small steps and questions everyone agrees with it, but then when you drop the big picture result everyone hates it.

If your job is to create one $20 bill every hour, why would anyone ever pay you more than $20/hr to do it? Maybe you get paid $17/hr to do it, $2 goes to overhead and $1 goes to the boss. There are 100 workers so the boss is making $100/hr. If you can solve this problem for how to make the 100 workers "rich" as well, then you will (ironically) become the richest person on Earth.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#95

Post by baggy_trough »

scarfaceneo wrote: post #74
Workaccount2 wrote: post #65

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.

That's exactly what they do, which is why the minimum wage is such a destructive policy.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#96

Post by ryandrake »

darkwater wrote: post #51
ryandrake wrote: post #37

What I'd love to know is: Assuming the founders pitched this idea for feedback to many people before getting this far, including to friends and family, didn't a single one of those people pull them aside and say: "Wait a minute, maybe stop and think about what you're actually creating here..." Could they find nobody in their circle of advisors who are able to empathize with low paid factory workers or at the very lea…

> What kind of bubble are the founders living in? The article points this out: both come from families owning sweatshop^W factories, so that's the bubble. They probably were applauded by their fathers for the good idea and execution.

But they at least went through a slightly-diverse undergrad university (Duke) and hopefully didn't spend it insulated from different kinds of people. Out of the thousands of students there, all of their friends happened to also be sweatshop heirs? I guess I just don't understand how someone, who's not royalty, can become a grown ass adult, never having had made friends with or developed at least some kind of empathy towards people unlike themselves.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#98

Post by some_random »

minimaxir wrote: post #86
some_random wrote: post #38

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…

> This easily could have been spun in a positive light A common trend among techies nowadays is doing marketing themselves as a part of personal branding, and then figuring out why marketing departments exist the hard way. The possibility of unforseen consequences is very high. If I ever create a startup I'll shut down all my social media and hire a community manager first, just to be safe. And I don't plan on creati…

This is exactly the way to do it, although ideally you don't have any in-house marketing and just have an emergency firm on retainer.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#99

Post by ryandrake »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #45

I believe there's a bright future for software that enhances and amplifies our humanity in different ways. What form would that take? If I knew, I'd be working on it, but I sense a lot of opportunity in un-disenchanting technology for various demographics. As for this tech: it should die in a fire. If the creators read this, they should understand that they are potentially inventing the shackles that they themselves…

> If the creators read this, they should understand that they are potentially inventing the shackles that they themselves will be bound in (albeit later).

I think a lot of techies are under the mistaken impression that when they're done building the society of Elysium, for some reason the billionaires are going to take them along to the space station to live with them.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#100

Post by gowld »

some_random wrote: post #41
ryandrake wrote: post #37

What I'd love to know is: Assuming the founders pitched this idea for feedback to many people before getting this far, including to friends and family, didn't a single one of those people pull them aside and say: "Wait a minute, maybe stop and think about what you're actually creating here..." Could they find nobody in their circle of advisors who are able to empathize with low paid factory workers or at the very lea…

In much of the world, working slowly as "number 17" was is viewed as a personal moral failing. Just as you might view a rude manager being chewed out as just, the founders here and their circle view the humiliation of this factory worker as correct and good.

"a personal moral failing" of the worker who is being exploited, of course. Not the exploiter watching the worker.
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