Reminds me of the story Manna: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
Thanks for the suggestion. Fantastic story!
AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
81–90 of 379 posts
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#82What does chess have in common with retail middle management? As someone who has managed a retail store and played chess, I can confidently answer: nothing. Remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy? And then IBM saturated the airwaves with ads about how Watson was going to revolutionize industries like energy and health care? Notice how we don’t see those ads anymore? It’s because winning Jeopardy has nothi…
>How is it going to convince Jack to switch his shift and come in to cover open on Sunday
Offer triple time taken from what otherwise would've been the human manager's pay?
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#83What does chess have in common with retail middle management? As someone who has managed a retail store and played chess, I can confidently answer: nothing. Remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy? And then IBM saturated the airwaves with ads about how Watson was going to revolutionize industries like energy and health care? Notice how we don’t see those ads anymore? It’s because winning Jeopardy has nothi…
Yeah I'm an AI maximalist and I don't see AI "management" in a 1:1 fashion happening. However I can see some orthogonal scenario where an "AI" run company - whatever that means in the future - manages a bunch of contracts as a middleman/market maker, thus obviating middle management altogether and making it a world of freelancers. So it could go that way...
> However I can see some orthogonal scenario where an "AI" run company
I don't think this can be done sustainably. AI can definitely run a company's operations, especially at scale. A fully AI-run company opens itself up to arbitrage of various sorts.
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#84This reminds me of an argument I got into at a bar with someone who claimed robots would inevitably replace bartenders. I took the view that bartenders would be the last occupation to be replaced by robots because if the goal was to minimize the cost to consume alcohol people wouldn't be coming to bars in the first place. There's a misconception that jobs with higher pay and more prestige will be the last to be repla…
>> I think upper management will be replaced by robots before middle management. You are already correct. In a sense, the highest level of management is the shareholder/owner. Capital allocation is one of the most highly automated tasks currently. We see this with SAA (Strategic Asset Allocation) programmes being run across all major capital managers and owners.
How is that an example of AI replacing management? The AI might determine what to invest in and thus who the owners of a company are, but humans still need to make decisions for the company.
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#85Middle managements primary job is making an employee feel supported, encouraged and empowered.
Guarantee an AI will be able to do none of that lol.
My first objective as middle management was always to bond on a personal level to some degree. I’d do this on a weekly basis to build trust:
- Talk about personal, but work appropriate topics — gardening, pets, sports, what have you.
- Discuss projects and objectives. Discuss concerns, things that went well, any support needed, etc
- discuss professional development (we’d outline these ahead of time). What progress is being made, how to go about achieving objectives, etc. often this was outside of work.
- discuss / mediate any interpersonal conflicts on the team
The most important aspect of my job as middle management was always the bonding. I doubt an AI can relate to gardening or getting a beer at a happy hour watching the local college football. Without that trust a team wouldn’t follow the AI.
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#86I think this article fundamentally misunderstands the core function of middle management. You can boil it down to 2 key tasks (on the front lines of a very large organization). a) Interpreting: either top->down by explaining and enforcing corporate policy on hourly workers or bottom->up by ensuring workers enter data to be reported on correctly b) "Encouraging": an employee calls in sick, again. Neither firing them o…
I feel like a chatbot could do B just about as well and it scales.
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#87What does chess have in common with retail middle management? As someone who has managed a retail store and played chess, I can confidently answer: nothing. Remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy? And then IBM saturated the airwaves with ads about how Watson was going to revolutionize industries like energy and health care? Notice how we don’t see those ads anymore? It’s because winning Jeopardy has nothi…
>How is it going to convince Jack to switch his shift and come in to cover open on Sunday Offer triple time taken from what otherwise would've been the human manager's pay?
How is it going to know when the workers then realise this is an option and collude to grief the AI manager in to paying them triple time?
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#88No post body was provided.
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#89This is such wonderful news.
Re: AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
#90This isn't a new idea, see Project Cybersyn[1].
A few books / works by Stafford Beer, who architected much of that project, that I recommend reading.
- Brain Of The Firm
- Designing Freedom, 1973 Massey Lectures[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-...