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'Hey Number 17 '

404media.co

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Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#101

Post by gowld »

theamk wrote: post #48
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…

Depends on how you pitch... "Today, workers who get paid per week might not notice they are working slow, and be super surprised when they get a very small paycheck at the end of the week. But with our technology, we give them the early warnings, so they can speed up so their paycheck is bigger! See, we benefit them!" It's all B.S. of course, but founders can be pretty convincing - charisma is one of the major requir…

Why is charisma needed? The snake is selling to other snakes. The victims aren't stakeholders.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#102

Post by gowld »

o11c wrote: post #46
ryandrake wrote: post #32

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)

Maybe a humane, ethical mindset can't be created via a 3hours a week certificated lecture?

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#103

Post by 47282847 »

jrussino wrote: post #81
krunck wrote: post #61

"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,…

> It's their turn to sit in the factory for 12 hour a day, 5+ days a week and have AI assisted asses badgering them all day. I'm reminded of this famous Jefferson quote: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give…

I read the Jefferson quote and his “I“ as part of society that gradually improve(s/d) to a point where people are given the chance to study what their passion is for passions sake - which is an end goal, where it can stop. Not as an individual family growth ladder that needs repetition.

As an “if we all work together we can achieve this paradise within three generations from where we are“.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#104

Post by steve_adams_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…

One of the things you can infer from this is that these people don't think the workers need to be supported by management. This is one of the most common forms of inefficiency I find, though. Management resents workers so much that they don't enable them to do work properly, due to a bias which leads them to believe their workers should be able to do more with less. A failure to invest in a functional work environment and content workers only leads to lowered productivity in a vicious cycle.

In my mind these guys are essentially telling on themselves for being clueless about most of what they're designing the software for. They think they get it, they're super confident, but when it comes down to it they're designing software based around very constrained and biased ideas of how factories should operate. They think they're innovating but they're actually trying to entrench patterns they think work well (but might not at all). Not bringing anything new or interesting, but regurgitated ML patterns other people innovated.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#106

Post by makeitdouble »

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!

I think it's more a leftover of Taylorism, where you cut tasks into bits small enough to not need craft and have an army of untrained and exchangeable workers do it.

Workers don't have enough agency to significantly pervert the metrics.

They can cut corners and/or work slower, but that's not inherently related to the metrics, and there is no long term view for the workers in the first place.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#107

Post by dusted »

This is quite disgusting, but at least they don't try to hide the evil behind some positive spin (which honestly, is even more repulsive). I especially like how they portray the managers complete lack of empathy for the situation of the worker, there's absolutely no regard for why he might have a bad month.

To quote a wise guy "I prefer my Nazis in uniform" (so I can properly identify and punch them in the face without them having any "oh but you misunderstood my good intentions sir"-kind of excuse).

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#108

Post by yapyap »

ryandrake wrote: post #99
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.

My theory is that the people working on it think they’ll get to a financial ‘class’ high enough in the process of working on tech. Be that over the course of how many decades. That they’ll be up there among them in the space station.

Either that or they’re not thinking about the future at all and just doing it for the near instant gratification of a high salary.

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#109

Post by water-data-dude »

philistine wrote: post #62
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…

To top it off, there is an upcoming movie with a lot of buzz called Mickey 17 about the dehumanization of a clone in a dystopic future where humans are replaceable. It's an insidious coincidence. I immediately thought 404 Media were talking about that movie before reading the article.

17 is “the least random number”, i.e. the number people choose most often when asked to pick a random number (between 1 and 20)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/17_(number)

Re: 'Hey Number 17 '

#110

Post by floren »

Read the title, thought it was a reference to The Prisoner

Read the article and realized it wasn't.

Thought about it some more and realized it was, just accidentally.

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