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Replacing Engineering Managers with AI Agents

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Re: Replacing Engineering Managers with AI Agents

#101
post #76

"Morning Stand-up Meetings: Instead of traditional stand-ups, engineers log into their systems and provide a brief update by sending a short voice message. EMAI processes these updates, analyzing voice tones for stress or uncertainty, ensuring it can provide resources or assistance if an engineer faces challenges. Task Allocation: Using real-time data on each engineer's strengths, past performance, learning curve, an…

When are you going to quit? When your manager starts using ChatGPT to summarize your review? When they start using it to automatically flag your async standup messages for signs of frustration? When they use it to prioritize tasks? It's going to be a very slow burn (if you aren't just replaced with an AI), and no point will seem worth quitting over, until you're managed by the AI.

If that was necessarily true, companies could get away with literally anything by doing it slowly.

It's not true though because unlike frogs, humans are capable of making judgments based on the first and second derivatives.

Re: Replacing Engineering Managers with AI Agents

#102

"Morning Stand-up Meetings: Instead of traditional stand-ups, engineers log into their systems and provide a brief update by sending a short voice message. EMAI processes these updates, analyzing voice tones for stress or uncertainty, ensuring it can provide resources or assistance if an engineer faces challenges. Task Allocation: Using real-time data on each engineer's strengths, past performance, learning curve, an…

> It'll be a cold day in hell before I work 5 minutes under those conditions.

It's still better than the current human managers, who aspire to this, but fail due to incompetence, laziness and petty biases.

Re: Replacing Engineering Managers with AI Agents

#103
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author's "utopic" notion of having an AI between your brain and spine ready to intercept neural impulses and hijack your body the instant you step out of line is about as horrifying as the "dystopic" scenario at the start of the story.

That seems a little "no true Scotsman", since every "utopia" can be twisted to hell if a few key elements get corrupted.

By the author, sure. Both scenarios result in loss of agency for the individual.

Re: Replacing Engineering Managers with AI Agents

#104
post #17

One thing I disagree with is saying that EMAI is objective. There's no machine learning model that is truly objective. They're all biased due to their, usually human generated, datasets. It's impossible to account sufficiently for every scenario in a training set, so these models just give an objective veneer to the biases of those that created the dataset. This phenomena is well documented with predictive models for…

It sounds like you're claiming that literally all predictive models just take some initial sampling bias and amplify it over time. Am I reading this right?

Maybe not every single predictive model (I don’t know every single one), but many of them do, yes.

Especially if you use data created as a direct product of that predictive model to further tune that model.

That bias would accumulate.

Re: Replacing Engineering Managers with AI Agents

#105
post #17

One thing I disagree with is saying that EMAI is objective. There's no machine learning model that is truly objective. They're all biased due to their, usually human generated, datasets. It's impossible to account sufficiently for every scenario in a training set, so these models just give an objective veneer to the biases of those that created the dataset. This phenomena is well documented with predictive models for…

One person's well-documented AI bias is another man's good calibration with reality they don't want to accept. Unintentional feedback loop amplifying the thing being measured is a problem, yes, but it doesn't stem from predictions themselves - it's decisions and actions informed by the predictions that can amplify the problem instead of reducing it.

Yes, the real problem is using data that is effectively created by a model to further “refine” that model. That’s what closes the bias accumulation loop.

But those not in the know can and do assume that it’s a computer program, so it can’t be biased, which is not the case for predictive models.

Re: Replacing Engineering Managers with AI Agents

#106
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically if there's no more need for software engineers then I think what follows next is that most forms of labor are being replaced by machines. There's already videos of machines hooked up to LLMs doing incredible things, so it's not much of a leap to go from this to machines taking orders, making food, working assembly line jobs, driving, etc.

Yeah honestly I feel for people whose jobs have been lost to automation in the past, but mostly because everyone else's didn't . If my job evaporates because AI can actually do it more efficiently, I'm not sure how much longer "work" is going to be a thing like it is now[1]. And personally I can't wait for that - but again, I'm in a privileged position where I won't starve immediately. My actual hope is that we're cr…

Who is "we"? Why would the wealthy keep the poor alive? Just look at all the people dying in tents on the sidewalk in any major US city.

Re: Replacing Engineering Managers with AI Agents

#107
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saving folks a search: https://marshallbrain.com/manna TLDR: Fiction about dystopic-vs-utopic outcomes from AI-management.

I love Manna. It strikes such a tongue-in-cheek deal between outsized, sort of ridiculous outcomes that come off as completely bonkers but still somehow make you think. "Automated management software replaces fast food workers" ---> "Utopians Bought Australia" Hard to think of other stories that manage that tone. Huxley's Island: "Self-serving journalist relates psychedelic ethnography" ---> "Magic Mushrooms Cannot S…

Accelerando! https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
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