It's too bad the AI can't just do the sewing.
Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
191–200 of 205 posts
Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
#192Is 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…
Perhaps real-time performance monitoring of people is wrong as well and marketing just made it sound less bad as it is? If your management tracks your commits/velocity, look for a better job. The market easily allows you to do this. It doesn't make sense anyway and anyone with some technical know-how knows this. This will escalate into something bad like publication metrics did to science. You end up with superfluous…
> If your management tracks your commits/velocity, look for a better job.
Don't most version-control systems support/automate this?
Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
#193I worked in a factory during university- made playground equipment out of metal. Every task had a reporting system and the company knew exactly who was producing what. This was a long time ago - they still used desktop calculators with paper tape to do calculations. I was only there for a relatively short time, I just wanted to work and make money for school. We were promised productivity bonuses - my section of the…
And the humans are also machines, purpose built over time to maximize efficiency and ignore anything else. Good employers are evolutionarily suboptimal, thats the issue.
Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Do you really think this tool is making folks micromanage and abuse employees or perhaps they already would be doing that and this tool helps it? There can be real value in these types of tools, its ultimately up to the implementation and I don't believe this tool will somehow make a happy work environment into an abusive one, the abuse will have most likely already existed.
The incentive is almost universally to micromanage and abuse employees. Reducing the friction will increase the incidence.
Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
The product is shit. At some point we have to put human decency first, and not lock people in AI-surveilled setups. If you're worried about some guy slacking, then hire some supervisors, ask them to chat with the employees, understand what their issues come from, if they had a rough week and they need some slack, etc. But doing it impersonally through an AI is inhumane. Imagine if you have kids and we replace all the…
Yet this is exactly how educational curricula are being developed right now - AI generates lesson plan based upon standards (easier for teachers), teacher feeds in reading assignment, etc., AI generates quiz and grades responses. Maybe there's human oversight, maybe not, but the education industry is largely embracing this AI control layer without much hesitation because it reduces cortisol for everyone except studen…
When the only way you’re able to see education is through the lens of job training and value production, you won’t give a shit about the experience of students. How can one measure the students’ suffering in terms of dollar bills? Same attitude used everywhere, but more egregious because it’s done to kids.
Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps real-time performance monitoring of people is wrong as well and marketing just made it sound less bad as it is? If your management tracks your commits/velocity, look for a better job. The market easily allows you to do this. It doesn't make sense anyway and anyone with some technical know-how knows this. This will escalate into something bad like publication metrics did to science. You end up with superfluous…
> If your management tracks your commits/velocity, look for a better job. Don't most version-control systems support/automate this?
It also tracks LOCs, but people learned that it is a bad metric. Velocity is basically the same, just with advanced stupidity.
But no, I have never used an environment where velocity is tracked. Of course my source control does provide data how often and what people do commit and you can use that data to create a meaningless number.
Some systems like Jira tracks something like Sprint velocity. Not much of a fan here either, but if used correctly, it is oriented towards a goal. That is the metric you should really track to see if you are still on course.
Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
It set off the flamewar detector. Moderators haven't touched it, except that we turned off the user flags on the story. Otherwise it would be displaying [flagged] at the top. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of the story ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... ). This doesn't mean we don't moderate at all, of course; that would be too large a loophole. But we do…
I greatly value and respect your moderation work. That consideration made me temper my words in the title and the post’s description. I did not create the thread with the intent to cause a flamewar, and in fact didn’t even realise the scope of the story until the very first comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170866 Everything I wrote was the conclusion of original research based entirely on what I read f…
The fact that you don't see how that title could have been more accurate and neutral is the problem with our world today. People think their opinions are fact, and their pre-existing political leanings are neutral objective reality.
It's the word "abuse". Even in that very poorly-produced video, there was no abuse. Bad word choice at worst. There's nothing neutral about the assumption of abuse.
And "Y Combinator backing..." makes it sound like YC is on board with "abuse".
Here's a neutral, accurate title: "YC24 startup Optifye makes software to optimize factory labor that could lead to abuse."
Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> We have nukes and a massive air force. > YC is funding weapon manufacturers lol. Where are the ethics there? Circular reasoning? The reason we have a massive and more importantly effective air force is because weapons development occurred. It would not take very long at all for China to surpass the US in terms of air effectiveness if the US stopped working on defense projects.
There is no circular reasoning here. I said funding weapons development is unethical, guy responded saying we need weapon development for deterrence, I point out that we have had plenty of effective weapons and the new ones will not be used for peer wars but for gladio/terrorism or regional wars.
Further weapon development just fuels arms races and puts the world in a worse place. That is why I find it unethical to fund it.
Also, btw, China already surpassed us despite all our spending. They are defining what a 6th gen fighter is, after all.
Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
And that's fine, but they're solely yours. 57% of US citizens support expanding the military. Further you have no evidence to back up your claim that anything outside of the Air Force and nukes are all that are required to properly deter threats. I would imagine that you also have no credible evidence that "Anything else being developed is for political suppression or fueling regional wars and imperial bullshit." If…
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Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your point is mooted. I’m both cases, an invention has far more potential negative applications than positive ones.
How is it moot? TNT was a massive safety boost for the mining industry. The negative uses were developed/adopted after it was invented. " an invention has far more potential negative applications than positive ones." Emphasis mine. Do you mean to say all inventions have more potential negative uses? Even say a toothbrush? I suppose that could be true, but then you have to look at magnitude of impact and rate of occur…
No, I was referring to dynamite and to the startup at the center of this controversy.