[HN Gopher] 'Hey Number 17 '
___________________________________________________________________
'Hey Number 17 '
Author : Amorymeltzer
Score : 281 points
Date : 2025-02-25 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.404media.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.404media.co)
| adocomplete wrote:
| I don't think the issue is necessarily the tool, but rather the
| execution. I think everybody can agree that improving efficiency
| is a good thing, and tools to track/improve it are a net benefit,
| but the way they approached it was abhorrent.
|
| But seriously, who approved posting that (before it was deleted)?
| alwa wrote:
| I'm not sure everybody can agree that improving efficiency is
| necessarily a good thing at all points on the curve, nor even
| that simple output metrics can fully capture it. Laundry
| workers at Disney memorably referred to the "efficiency"
| leaderboard management forced on them--to improve "efficiency"
| through public humiliation--as the "electronic whip."
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/10/21/disne...
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >I think everybody can agree that improving efficiency is a
| good thing, and tools to track/improve it are a net benefit
|
| Well in a void, yes, but in reality, no: You pay prices to
| acquire things. Occasionally we increase efficiency with no
| downsides aside from investment cost or complexity, but much
| more commonly at least part of the price paid is increased
| pressure on those at the bottom (lower wages, unemployment,
| time, stress, dignity, etc etc).
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Well in a void, yes, but in reality, no: You pay prices to
| acquire things.
|
| It's worse than this, the product designers are marketing to
| the manufacturers that place the least possible value on the
| things that allow it to exist - workers and society.
| At Optifye, I am using my expertise in computer vision to
| solve a manufacturing company owner's biggest problem: low
| labor productivity!
|
| Defining workers as the "owner's biggest problem" sounds a
| lot like signaling to they type of owner who never sees the
| backs they stepped on to get where they are.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Man, you would make a excellent role for a hollywood version of
| Dantes Inferno.
| IncandescentGas wrote:
| > I think everybody can agree that improving efficiency is a
| good thing
|
| At what point does demanding top efficiency from a human every
| minute of every work shift cross the line into abuse? I would
| argue this tool is miles over that that line.
|
| Workplaces should server the workers too, not just the capital
| interests of the owners.
| IncandescentGas wrote:
| =~ s/server/serve/ :D
| sweeter wrote:
| AI iS gOInG tO mAkE tHe wOrLD a BeTtEr PlAcE. Mhm, I'm sure.
| These people don't see those that they believe are underneath
| them as human beings. They are cattle to have their blood
| drained for profit. Privacy? Ethics? Integrity? Humanity?...
| Or money?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > At what point does demanding top efficiency from a human
| every minute of every work shift cross the line into abuse?
|
| Minimizing human value leads to greater dividends to the only
| parties that ultimately matter - execs and shareholders.
|
| Dodge vs Ford has safeguarded these parasitic behaviors for
| over a century.
|
| ref: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
| arti... The case, Dodge v. Ford Motor
| Company, was about minority shareholders' ability to
| challenge the authority of the board of directors to make
| business decisions that were alleged to be serving interests
| other than maximizing the value of plaintiffs' shares.
| klik99 wrote:
| If they tweaked it to show the monthly output of this guy was
| great but he was just having one bad day and their response
| was more compassionate then it wouldn't have been so
| dystopian looking.
|
| Instead it looks like the next abstract evolution of a whip.
| striking wrote:
| Tools that are too efficient in improving efficiency make it
| very easy to bring about inhumane environments. I have found
| this to be a pretty generally applicable line of reasoning.
| hn_user82179 wrote:
| The thing that got me (random person with no factory
| experience), their own website and the HN Startup page sounds
| fantastic. AI + cameras to identify bottlenecks is a huge gain.
| I never would've realized it was actually for monitoring the
| _workers'_ outputs.
| itronitron wrote:
| Improving efficiency in a system generally reduces it's
| resilience, so improving efficiency is definitely not always a
| good thing.
| dieselgate wrote:
| Dang this was depressing and appropriate to read on HN I guess.
|
| In unrelated I saw a license plate with just "YC" today.
|
| I thought the article was gonna be the following joke:
|
| It's a guys first night in jail. At 9pm one of the other inmates
| yells "51!" And all the other inmates laugh and laugh. A moment
| later another inmate yells "29!" And all the other inmates laugh
| and laugh. The new inmate asks the cellmate - what's going on
| with the numbers? The other inmate replies, "we've all been in
| here so long we assigned jokes to a number and just say them
| instead. Why don't you give it a try?"
|
| So the new inmates yells - "14!". And it's silent The new inmate
| asked the cellmate, "what happened, what did I do wrong?"
|
| And the cellmate said, "you didn't tell it right.."
| kennethrc wrote:
| ... and I'd heard the variation: Another inmate calls out "36!"
| which brings out raucous laughter. The new inmate asks why that
| one got such a great response, to be told "We haven't heard
| that one before!"
| dieselgate wrote:
| That's hilarious hadn't heard that one before ;)
| speak_plainly wrote:
| Imagine if they had read something like Out of the Crisis by W.
| Edwards Deming.
|
| Instead of creating a digital whip for shallow (or even outright
| harmful) managers, they could have developed a QA tool grounded
| in real, deep thinking--one that respects proven principles of
| manufacturing.
|
| There's still time to course-correct, and embracing some of the
| foundational literature on the topic could make the difference.
| giantrobot wrote:
| That doesn't sound like disruption at all. Don't you
| understand? These people went to _Stanford_ (or some other
| renowned school) so they know better than anyone with
| experience. The Torment Nexus is the future!
|
| /s
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| o11c wrote:
| 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)
| ryandrake wrote:
| I fondly remember "Social and Ethical Issues In Computing"
| which I took in my senior year as an undergrad. Lots of
| "can we / should we" discussions. Topics included "IP,
| Patents and Piracy," "Encryption and Privacy," "Robotics,
| Automation and AI," "White Hat / Black Hat hacking," Phiber
| Optik and Kevin Mitnick (I'm dating myself here, my class
| predated the Snowden stuff by almost 20 years). A lot of
| the curriculum was from _High Noon on the Electronic
| Frontier_ , a copy of which I still have! Some of it was
| fluff, like we watched and discussed Ghost In The Shell
| (LOL), but overall I thought it was a decent current-
| issues/ethics course, which IMO should have probably been
| required to graduate with the title "Engineer."
| gowld wrote:
| Maybe a humane, ethical mindset can't be created via a
| 3hours a week certificated lecture?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Reminds of the hinges scene in Schindler's List
|
| https://youtu.be/I-yLk8SZAJY?feature=shared
| uoaei wrote:
| I think we should have a reckoning as a society regarding the
| prevalence and predilections of sociopaths. Patric Gagne is a
| PsyD with diagnosed sociopathy (technically anti-social
| personality disorder, _I think_ ) who writes and speaks about her
| experience and she makes a number of good points. One is that we
| often can't conceive of sociopaths as anything but the stylized
| depictions we get in media where they are often portrayed as
| violent animal abusers or serial killers. Her next point is that
| reframing this image by identifying a disorder she proposes
| should be called "low affect disorder" will make it more apparent
| how people afflicted by it consider and navigate through the
| world to help us more readily address the potential harms
| associated with that kind of apathy. It would help us all to be
| able to recognize that kind of behavior to the point where we can
| box and name it, challenging its ability to cause harm
| undetected.
|
| One hopeful note is that the apathy goes both ways: harm is just
| a means to an end, and if we can offer alternative paths to those
| ends that don't incentivize harm then we'd all be better for it.
|
| This kind of company, as well as the activities of YC generally,
| is evidence that we have normalized a certain kind of harm
| through the development of our economic and government
| institutions. Those with low affect and who struggle in the
| empathy department are more than happy to live with ideologies
| that ignore suffering as long as it's separated by one or more
| layers of bureaucracy. This normalization is essentially sanity-
| washing for the profit motive.
|
| I don't see anything indicating this trend will reverse in the
| near future, there's a pathology in society that seems to prevent
| _actual accountability_ these days.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > One is that we often can't conceive of sociopaths as anything
| but the stylized depictions we get in media where they are
| often portrayed as violent animal abusers or serial killers.
|
| This is psychopaths!!! Sociopaths are different. Sociopaths
| just lack empathy, they do not necessarily want to _do anything
| with that_. Psychopaths are the ones who _intentionally_ cause
| harm. Psychopaths can have empathy and simply choose to ignore
| it.
| uoaei wrote:
| As I understand, the terminology has evolved since the time
| that _Dexter_ was still being released.
|
| The DSM-V does not list either sociopathy or psychopathy, so
| any definitions ultimately have no authority and are merely
| colloquial.
|
| That being said, I remember an effort to discourage the use
| of "psychopath" and to move them under the umbrella of
| "sociopath" since it was more of a condition affecting social
| behaviors than psychology per se.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I would be capable of psychopathy, but not sociopathy,
| because I am capable of empathy, but can consciously choose
| to ignore it when necessary. Both labels have their uses.
| Etheryte wrote:
| This is exactly why we need regulations that prohibit this. The
| upcoming EU regulations [0] seem to at least partially cover
| this, as employment is one of the high risk categories for AI
| systems. What that means in detail is still to be seen, but at
| least the groundwork is already there.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152937
| Rygian wrote:
| What the article describes is already very very hard to achieve
| legally under GDPR. I don't think new regulations are required.
| theamk wrote:
| Will those regulations help with non-AI version of the same?
|
| If you want plot a worker's performance graphs (and fire them
| for underperformance), you don't need any AI or vision or even
| a computer, just a supervisor who manually counts the workers'
| outputs.
|
| "Hey number 17, how come you made only has 10 boxes this
| morning, while number 16's has made 25 boxes already. Work
| harder!"
|
| Unlike AI stuff, it will only be daily/twice-per-day; but that
| is still enough for the dystopia that is described in the
| article.
| fragmede wrote:
| wdym _if_?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| GDPR also makes this practically impossible: a
| camera pointed straight at your face every working moment
| profiling use of AI
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Consider nearly any professional sports team and the relative
| effort that athletes put in. There's very little disagreeing on
| objectives our outcomes (score/prevent points, win games) and
| incentives are directly tied to this (win more games, get more
| money).
|
| And yet when you listen to what some of the highest-performing
| athletes say, they'll readily admit they don't go 100% effort
| 100% of the time. In fact, that's often a very bad thing to do
| because you can burn out quickly, and then the opposing team who
| paced themselves a little better starts running over you.
| However, there are spurts of intense activity where you really do
| go 100%, and then you quickly dial that back again to make sure
| you have effort reserved in the tank. Ideally you get down to 0
| at the end of the game, but it's also readily acknowledged that
| sometimes this is out of your control, and often in quite
| significant ways, like the football bouncing weirdly when it
| popped out of someone's hands.
|
| All of this is to say that there's a deep obsession in the
| corporate world around efficient teams performing labor, but when
| you get into organized sports where there's literal teams
| fighting for an objective, they don't chase "efficiency" that
| would amount to "time doing useful things on the field". Such a
| measure would be ridiculous.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Romario (soccer player from long ago) is a prime example of
| this. One of the best scorers ever, he was pretty much static
| most of the time. Until.
| bandofthehawk wrote:
| I pretty much agree with everything you said, but trying to
| think of a counter example I'm reminded of the movie Moneyball.
| Reviewing the detailed stats of each baseball player vs. the
| cost of hiring them seems pretty close to measuring "time doing
| useful things on the field". I'm not sure how common this
| practice is in general in current professional sports.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| It's also worth pointing out that the "Moneyball" strategy
| ultimately failed because it produced a team who could
| succeed in the regular season, but fail consistently in the
| playoffs and ultimately lead to good players leaving due to
| salary constraints.
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| This is exactly my issue with "sprints" and "Agile".
|
| As a business, even as a "project" the needs change between the
| start and the end of a project. Periods of low and high
| activity coincide with the various phases of things. Expecting
| some crunch time at the end and allowing some slack time at the
| start/middle allows a natural flow.
|
| Now managers have decided employees must work at a high level
| of output/at crunch time pace ALL the time. Any change in
| forecasted points, burn down results in meltdowns at the VP and
| higher levels, while actual expectations, requirements and
| deadlines are changed at the drop of a hat multiple times.
|
| Waterfall (not the sprint version of waterfall, the Deming
| version of waterfall with iteration between steps) gives a much
| more natural alignment of this while also ensuring the starting
| point doesn't get shifted at the whims of a VP with a "good
| idea" in the middle of a project.
| itronitron wrote:
| It's a general rule in operations management that you never run
| at more than 80% of your productive capacity. The extra 20%
| 'slack' is there to be used to ensure your throughput remains
| steady.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > In fact, that's often a very bad thing to do because you can
| burn out quickly
|
| Bingo! Sport's teams _avoid_ burning out the talent, because
| they are hard to replace. Corporates are ambivalent at best,
| with most accepting some churn for higher profitability. They
| may even pay for mental health benefits to ameliorate the
| effects, but remain happy with a "high performance" burnout
| culture where people cycle out after 18-24 months.
| pzmarzly wrote:
| 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 target audience, then I guess the ad is
| well made? Identify bad employees faster so you can hire better
| ones quicker, yada yada. I can imagine how this promise can make
| someone want to buy the software, so fair play for the ad
| creators, I guess?
|
| I really hope this project fails though.
| karel-3d wrote:
| well the iPhones won't make themselves
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I was wondering how many humans still touch an iPhone during
| it's production in a Foxconn factory.
|
| Looking at this 2023 article[0], a lot. 35000 workers on
| three factories in India, solely dedicated to produce recent
| gen iPhones, with depcting of manual assembly down to
| screwing parts. I was expecting they automatized a lot more.
|
| https://restofworld.org/2023/foxconn-india-iphone-factory/
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| They pay so little it's cheaper not to.
| causal wrote:
| 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!
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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.
| rudasn wrote:
| _Scientific Management_. It 's one of those areas of study
| where one can easily miss the forest for the trees. It
| sounds so good, it must be right!
| minimaxir wrote:
| The surprising thing here is that the startup/YC deleted the
| video. If the startup was based in San Francisco they'd be
| running billboards bragging about the productivity boost.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42380054
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| You could stick to your guns and defend the company your supposed
| to be supporting, you could not fund these people to begin with,
| or you could admit a mistake and be honest that it was one. To
| not do any of these seems like the absolute worst. Morality
| aside, you'd think YC would at least enough money to hire a good
| PR person to respond to a reporter with _something_ at all for
| moments like these!
|
| You gotta really wonder what they are going to teach you at the
| "AI Startup School" they keep advertising at the bottom of this
| site..
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| It should come as a surprise to nobody that a venture capital
| firm is Bad, Actually.
| imglorp wrote:
| We were told the machines would free us from repetitive or
| injurious work, letting us pursue more meaningful and prosperous
| lives. Or at least they would be our partners we could leverage.
|
| Instead, will they be the tools of our enslavement to The Man?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| When was the last time in history that people didn't use the
| most advanced technology to subdue/imprison/etc. other people?
|
| I am not saying that good things didn't happen, but where there
| is money to be made, money WILL be made. And for some countries
| that don't enjoy regulations like GDPR (China, India, with
| growing economies 'solutions' like this will definitely come to
| play). Some people will replace a form of slavery with a newer
| form of slavery.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] Lots of discussion earlier:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170850
| RIMR wrote:
| Not a dupe.
|
| The last thread was just someone drawing attention to what they
| saw. This thread is in response to an investigative piece by
| 404 Media.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| It's the same _discussion_. You can share 404 's ragebait
| over there in the investigation thread we already have a
| created by an HNer.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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 least point out the potential PR
| downside of this work? What kind of bubble are the founders
| living in? If I pitched this idea to a random sampling of 10 of
| my friends, I guarantee all 10 of them would retch in disgust.
| some_random wrote:
| 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.
| gowld wrote:
| "a personal moral failing" of the worker who is being
| exploited, of course. Not the exploiter watching the worker.
| theamk wrote:
| 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 requirements for their job.
| gowld wrote:
| Why is charisma needed? The snake is selling to other snakes.
| The victims aren't stakeholders.
| darkwater wrote:
| > 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| some_random wrote:
| 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 positive light, imagine a
| commercial where they use their technology to discover that an
| employee was using a broken machine or that there was a
| bottleneck farther up the assembly line that could improve rates!
| But no, it was a cold look into how sweatshop operators view
| their workers.
| philistine wrote:
| 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.
| water-data-dude wrote:
| 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)
| tqi wrote:
| FWIW, I think people are getting confused because this is
| framed as a technology story, not a story about the inhumane
| conditions in sweatshops. I feel like this framing is common in
| a lot of news stories (big tech being the villain du jour), and
| is unhelpful because it causes folks who otherwise agree with
| each other to fixate on the "is technology bad or is it
| neutral" angle, which gets in the way of any actual agreement
| or progress.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The part that is new is technology making things worse. To me
| that qualifies as a technology story.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| No, this framing is exactly right. It highlights how Y
| Combinator and tech companies are complicit in the inhumane
| conditions of sweatshops.
|
| You don't get to create this product and then absolve
| yourself of its negative impact of it.
| minimaxir wrote:
| > 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 creating a dystopian startup.
| some_random wrote:
| 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.
| silisili wrote:
| Good suggestions. That would have completely reframed it in a
| more positive light. Even if staying on the 'worker' aspect, if
| they at least pretended to empathize, asked what's wrong/what
| they need, etc, could have put a tiny tinge of heartwarming on
| it.
|
| But no, right to insults and presumably firing right after the
| clip ended. Why would any VC company knowingly go near this
| with a 10 ft pole?
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| to make money
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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.
| fullshark wrote:
| The upcoming AI powered laborer surveillance will not stop at
| sweatshop employees btw.
| neilv wrote:
| I disapprove of this application (knowing how these things will
| be used), but I hesitate to condemn whomever worked on it,
| without knowing more.
|
| A few background thoughts...
|
| I remember browsing angel.co, and most of the startup blurbs were
| just depressing -- either crypto scams, or people who sounded
| unaware that they were doing something bad for society. Many
| worse-sounding than this one. So depressing, that even LinkedIn
| was a more pleasant place to be scrolling job listings.
|
| But there can't be _that_ many sociopaths, as it appeared there
| were on angel.co; they 're probably mostly just people with not
| much world experience, and perhaps too much techbro echo chamber
| time, now going through the motions they were taught about how to
| be a startup founder.
|
| Also, there's modes based on context, and I'll embarrass myself
| here... I remember during the dotcom gold rush, when I'd already
| had wholesome values instilled in me, plus the usual Internet-
| before-it-went-corporate values, yet I found on occasion I got
| distracted from those, in a mode. I was a grad student with a
| research assistantship, in a lab that had sponsors and VIPs
| coming through every day. I recall one time some people from a
| particular huge music industry company came through. So, I start
| telling them something about the emerging democratization of
| creation and distribution of high-quality music... and how I
| thought their company can get ahead of that. Afterwards, I was,
| like, why did I go out of my way to do that, like an amoral hired
| gun? On any other day, I'd be trying to help people to be
| empowered, and encourage them to get rid of that same company.
|
| Going back to this particular application domain, another
| thought... If you've worked with factory people, at least the
| ones I did (in a startup introducing a new factory station) were
| delightful, and I can't imagine imposing this system on people
| there. Maybe that's another reason to know your customers and
| users: not only understanding the problem domain and getting the
| MVP right, but also to engage our natural human empathy and
| caring.
| some_random wrote:
| I understand where you're coming from but that demo video makes
| it very, very clear that the founders knew exactly how it was
| going to be used and explicitly approved. It is completely
| unambiguous that they have zero regard for natural human
| empathy and caring, and view slow factory workers as worthy of
| humiliation and punishment.
| neilv wrote:
| I actually assume that this tech will almost immediately be
| used _worse_ than in the video skit.
|
| If anything, I think they're unaware or sugar-coating it, but
| not doing a great PR job of that for US audiences.
| some_random wrote:
| I don't understand how you could come to that conclusion,
| they are referring to a sweatshop employee by a number and
| humiliating him for bad performance to the audience. How
| much more explicit would their demo have to be in order for
| you to believe they understand how their tech will be used?
|
| Edit: They know exactly what they are doing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175023#43176516
| neilv wrote:
| 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 meetings, or have a
| lot of world experience. The impression in the video is
| that they're imagining a class-based dynamic, with
| someone from a lower class than them being a lazy and
| unmotivated problem worker, and how they think is
| culturally appropriate to interact. That might actually
| be what they envision. But we have enough analogous
| examples, for decades, to assume that many customers will
| use it even worse. And with interaction flavors that are
| more culturally familiar and recognizable to us in the
| US.)
|
| Edit: I didn't see your edit link when I responded. Yes,
| I think that link fits my first impression. I'll stand by
| my position that the condemning comments have been done
| enough, and that some other nuance and alternate
| interpretations might apply, and are worth mentioning,
| for this case and in general.
| some_random wrote:
| 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 worst what they believe is a
| palatable view of sweatshops for the western audience
| they're seeking funding from.
| neilv wrote:
| 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.
| itronitron wrote:
| _" they're not confessing, they're bragging"_
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| 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 will be bound in (albeit
| later).
| ryandrake wrote:
| > 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.
| yapyap wrote:
| 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.
| gowld wrote:
| It's giving https://www.monticello.org/slavery/online-
| exhibitions-relate...
|
| > Many slaveowners, including Jefferson, understood that female
| slaves--and their future children--represented the best means to
| increase the value of his holdings, what he called "capital." "I
| consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more
| profitable than the best man of the farm," Jefferson remarked in
| 1820. "What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his
| labors disappear in mere consumption."
| HenryBemis wrote:
| GDPR doesn't allow any of that garbage.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| >For the workers? They get the tantalizing benefit of being "held
| accountable for good or bad performance."
|
| No. They will not be 'held accountable' nor rewarded for good
| performance. The reward will be the ever-rising bar on
| performance until management is satisfied that they will never be
| required to pay out on those motivational performance bonuses and
| that workers fear for their jobs.
| krunck wrote:
| "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, "My family also _runs_ several manufacturing plants
| in various industries, which has given me unrestricted access to
| assembly lines since I was 15." "
|
| So these guys come from families that run factories and manage
| workers. They NEVER worked in one themselves. 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.
| some_random wrote:
| Glad to see that their mandatory ethics and liberal arts
| classes have instilled empathetic and humanist values in them.
| morkalork wrote:
| Well you know what they say, you can lead a horse to water
| jrussino 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 their children a right to study painting, poetry, music,
| architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
|
| I think it's natural for us to want to climb ever-higher on
| Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and I think that's essentially
| what Jefferson was expressing.
|
| But there's a perverse version of this that happens in our
| society, because for so many of us life gets framed as a ladder
| or a hill you have to climb, and your position feels so very
| precarious - no matter where you start or how high you climb!
|
| And so we see certain work as "beneath our station". I don't
| want to make assumptions about what's in the hearts of these
| particular founders, but I've met plenty who grow to see even
| the work of their _own parents_ as beneath them, because no
| matter how high you started, it 's a failure if you ever slip
| below.
|
| For so many of us, being in a position to own and operate
| multiple manufacturing plants would afford us a life of
| relative luxury and status beyond what we imagine we could
| realistically achieve. But to someone who can practically
| inherit that position by default, even that isn't enough. They
| need to automate it away, to build a larger empire, to take
| another step up the wealth and status ladder.
|
| I'm not sure exactly how to criticize this. I agree with the
| spirit of that Jefferson quote. I often think of my own life
| and the lives of my kids through the lens of Maslow's
| hierarchy. I think maybe the problem is that the material
| wealth and social status that get used as a ruler for measuring
| a "good life" have become so incredibly de-coupled from
| actually doing good work and/or being a good person.
| 47282847 wrote:
| 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".
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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 keep almost all value they create and are never in
| a position to generate massive value. They are perpetually right
| on the threshold of being unprofitable to employ.
|
| So the problem then becomes "How do you keep a worker above that
| profitability threshold when they are barely above it?". You can
| have kludgey borderline inhumane approaches like this, or maybe
| try to use perks as coercion to hit targets, but not matter what
| it's a very difficult problem to solve.
|
| Everyone jumps to "Pay them more" but almost everyone is unaware
| (and certainly unwilling) that that would necessitate cutting
| money from their checks to buffer the profitability threshold of
| these bottom tier workers.
| scarfaceneo wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| The stark reality of capitalism is that it's a business
| transaction. If they can't make enough profit from the
| sweatshop to make a profit, why would they keep the factory
| running? They're not running a charity, so they will just
| close that factory and open it somewhere else with cheaper
| labor due to lax labor laws. If X > Y, where X is the cost to
| operate the factory and Y is the money made from selling the
| goods from the factory, the factory eventually closes.
|
| I won't shed any tears for capital either, but pretending
| they're going to operate a charity out of the goodnesses of
| their hearts and not a business that generates profit is not
| a winning strategy to get them to socialize the means of
| production.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| That's exactly what they do, which is why the minimum wage is
| such a destructive policy.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| This is exactly like that famous tweet about the torment
| nexus[1], but they're trying to make the factory from Charlie
| Chaplin's Modern Times[2].
|
| [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus
|
| [2] https://criterioncloseup.com/2015/06/14/modern-
| times-1936-ch...
| hector126 wrote:
| > Mohta wrote, "My family also runs several manufacturing plants
| in various industries, which has given me unrestricted access to
| assembly lines since I was 15."
|
| Color me not remotely surprised.
| adolph wrote:
| 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.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| Late-stage capitalism is watching the movie "THX-1138" and
| getting inspired to write a YC pitch.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Imagine what it would be like working for these pricks.
| dusted wrote:
| 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).
| floren wrote:
| 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.
| zafka wrote:
| Damn!! For the longest time, when asked to leave a number by a
| voice mail I have used 17. Now while perusing the comments here,
| I find out it is the most commonly picked number. There goes my
| perceived sense of originality. Sigh......
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