Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
Optifye.ai is a dystopian company backed by Y Combinator. They’re using AI to further dehumanise and abuse individual factory workers and treat them like disposable automatons.
See a now deleted post where they show how it works:
https://hachyderm.io/@YvanDaSilva/114063748264591929
The founders look to be a couple of rich kids with little world and work experience:
> We’re CS grads from Duke and because our families run manufacturing companies (…)
They also display a profound lack of empathy by bragging about lowering stress for rich company owners, which they do by increasing the stress of everyone who works for them:
> Know any manufacturing company owners?
> Let us know at founders@optifye.ai, and we’ll help them drop their cortisol levels :)
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/optifye-ai
This is the AI world we all know is coming, brought to you by Y Combinator investors and founders. It doesn’t “benefit humanity”, it just serves to “put you in your place”.
Has this been manually delisted from the frontpage? It doesn't say it's flagged, but it's no longer on there.
EDIT: looks like it's #157 now, I think I just misunderstand the ranking mechanism.
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 moderate less.
For example, under normal circumstances our standard practice would be to downweight a thread like this one, because outrage posts (what we used to call riler-uppers*) are not normally on topic for Hacker News. We also might edit the title to be less sensational and more accurate and neutral. And we would leave the user flags on. In the present case, we've overriden all of that in order to follow the rule I just mentioned.
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of the story
I believe this because it makes sense to me.
I think a habit of tempered reactions allows the understanding - that criticism is valuable in healthy doses.
Adding this: Having HN's stance plainly said is valuable too.
The only thing truly embarrassing is that nobody at YC advised them that this ad is 1) terribly amateur and 2) has the chance to look extremely bad. Did not advise and in fact published to their feed. Weird optics, I am not familiar with what I presume to be Indian factories, other than the wild lack of safety (thanks youtube) but I cannot see how this video does anything positive.
As for the product itself I don't think it is unusual, these types of measurement systems are not new and can be helpful for a factory, like all things, it boils down to the owner/managers of said factory not the tool.
> like all things, it boils down to the owner/managers of said factory not the tool.
Tools are created and optimised for a purpose. If you gouge someone’s eye out with chopsticks or a spoon, their inventors are hardly at fault. If you kill a bunch of people with an AK-47, its inventor doesn’t get a free pass.¹
These guys clearly built this tool to crack down on factory workers. They aren’t excused when managers use their tool for the thing it was made for.
¹ https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/13/262096410...
saw someone point out how they could have framed it as a way to reward good workers, but instead they showed how they can go after people underperforming. Just bad framing and shows how out of touch they are
If we're being real here: it's excellent framing for their customers who very likely does this but slower (and with an equal amount of empathy). The framing is excellent in terms of the basics of pitching: know your audience identify bottlenecks, present a solution to remove bottlenecks, and clearly demonstrate how.
The optics of presenting this in a public domain full of people who relate more to the factory worker than the middle manager is indeed tonedeaf, though.
If anyone is reading from YC, I'm happy to review their submissions, I was perhaps the first who raised concerns and was on top of the thread with my comment.
(See this post I made on LinkedIn about this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-de...)
I haven't read the details or watched the video, but it does sound like you noticed something that should not have been there.
I noticed that your page says this:
> New: the thread "Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers" on Hacker News got removed from the front page despite having 242 points.
The thread fell in rank because it set off a software penalty called the flamewar detector. We haven't taken any moderator action or touched it in any way. Our usual practice is to downweight shallow outrage posts (because they're not what the site is for), but we haven't done so in this case, because we have a core rule of moderating less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is in a story. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)
If you want to be fair, you could add that information. Otherwise, readers will assume you mean that we nefariously censor negative posts about YC, when the truth is the opposite.
Edit: after I posted this, I noticed that the thread said [flagged] at the top. That's because users flagged it—as they usually do with shallow outrage threads. However, I've turned the flags off in keeping with the rule I just mentioned.
Believe it or not, founders don't run every single thing they do by the YC partners!
> Believe it or not, nobody suggested you need to run everything by a partner!
Believe it or not, nobody suggested you need to run everything by a partner! I would expect someone to at least watch a video once before posting it in a congratulatory post on YC's feed. It is not a criticism of startup culture but watching that video I genuinely question how far quality has fallen?
I don’t think it’s fallen, I think they just repost press releases and 99.9% of the time it’s uneventful.
Still, did no one watch the press release video upstream of this post? Either they are posting garbage press releases without really reviewing the content, or (worse) one or multiple people genuinely saw no problem with it.
Sure, but it seems like this was posted to (and now deleted from) the @ycombinator X account with a "Congrats on the launch!" message.
Tbh this isn’t that crazy. If you hire someone to do their job outputting 10 items per hour and that number is reasonable because a bunch of other workers you hired for the same job are doing it and 1 guy hits 1 per hour then that guys shouldn’t be doing that job.
The outrage should be focused on the absolute meme of their ad video cuz they were like “lets literally have a convo with an individual but refer to them as a workspace and have them say human painful responses but then just shit on them anyway impersonally”
The product is not crazy. The video is wild.
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 their pitiful wages.
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.
>or perhaps they already would be doing that and this tool helps it?
Yes. I don't think we should ethically encourage the abuse of workers. And that official lens of marketing can and will shape who reaches out, even if the tool can indeed be used ethically. Framing is key.
As a tame example: think of the graphic design and marketing of red bull vs Monster. They have the same basic ingredients and purpose but that simple red bull design vs the in-your-face punk-esque vibe of Monster will change who buys it, how they identify with it, and even alter the perception of how it tastes.
> and this tool helps it
And that is bad.
> the abuse will have most likely already existed.
The abuse will get worse. The correct ethical answer to “the conditions are bad” is “improve the conditions” not “make them worse”.
Maybe the implementation could include an option to show the worker's name.
Absolutely I expect it to be used to micromanage and abuse. Yes those behaviours already exist that’s why I know a tool that enables them will amphifly them
picture this: corporate buys something (like O365), and is reluctant to end licensing for the bundle. So... if they're locked into a contract that includes management-abuse-as-a-service, enabling bad behaviors, do you think they'll back out of enabling that one abusive manager out of five? how will that impact the workforce?
Shouldn't the manager of the 'bunch of workers' notice the guy is underperforming and understand why ? Maybe that manager is the one that shouldn't be doing that job
And they do that by either looking over your shoulder (1 person at a time) or collecting metrics on the entire team and the output. Both of these have different downsides.
The biggest issue is leadership or managers always wanting the number to go up from the individual. "We need 12 widgets per hour instead of 10 for just this one quarter bro" but then that becomes the new norm and eventually "We need 14/16/18/20 widgets per hour..."
It's boiling frog management that makes people distrust managers doing any kind of performance monitoring
yah this is exactly what labor law says in some countries: a manager standing behind your desk? ok. a machine surveilling you? not ok.
Yeah it’s a matter of scale. The manager can’t stand behind your desk and watch you all day every day. AI can.
This is idealistic. In reality, we have more control over tools than how they are used - in general we have more control over changes earlier in the pipeline. Precious little control, but more control.
Continued rant :
It’s kinda like a ruler. If you measure workers so that one’s doing 10x less/worse output than the average that’s good.
If you compare workers down to the .01% difference in output that’s stupid and inhumane.
Yes, but many business owners/managers are stupid and inhumane.
Yeah. I did new car prep for a dealership as a teen.
Ask me how many cars I did per day: totally reasonable. Make me clock in and out for every car I work on: bad.
So you’d be ok with this AI being applied to other industries? Maybe lines of code?
It's clear you never worked in a factory and you have just as much empathy as these CS grads. This kind of thinking why I hate capitalism so much.
I worked in a factory multiple times and I can tell from experience nobody needs a stupid performance measurement like this. Your manager will make sure you work you ass off. Or you work with a big dangerous machine so you have to pay very much attention all day. Of course not every factory is the same, but putting even more pressure to factory workers like this is just inhumane and the most capitalist move I can imagine. Next step is to put robotic whips next to the lines and when their productivity goes below a specific value hit them automatically... Literal slavery.
I mean, if you're gonna make this kind of software to track individuals, you could, at bare minimum, throw a name in there so that the supervisor doesn't have start the chat with "hey number seventeen".
If literally having your identity reduced to a number in the process of getting yelled at for not being productive doesn't seem bad/crazy to you, I'm guessing there isn't anything I could say to move you.
> Tbh this isn’t that crazy.
Yep, seems like a bog standard accountability / performance management.
> The product is not crazy. The video is wild.
This is how it all starts. Sane solutions wielded by madmen.
Looking for 10x discrepancies is not how this will be used, and you know it. Adoption of this sort of tech is going to lead to Amazon "peeing in bottles" situations. It's wild how much faith people have in the ethics of business owners, especially the ultra-wealthy.
Your example sounds reasonable but it's not realistic: The actual use of this type of tools is to intimidate those workers who have outputted 9.8 items instead of the average 9.9 over the past week.
This is how our society ended up making Amazon delivery workers urinating in fucking bottles inside their trucks.
You've spent 32.8 seconds urinating this shift, 1.3 seconds longer than average. Your bonus has been reduced until performance meets standards. At Amazon, the customer comes first!
Congratulations! This week your urination schedule has improved. Enjoy a Kindle credit on us, good for any ebook license under $2.99. At Amazon, our partners come first!
I wish entrepreneurs would stop trying to make Manna[1] a reality. It's supposed to be a dystopia, people. Stop trying to create it!
1: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
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 their teachers with just a camera and an AI, that "teaches them to write" and then nag them if they're not "as good as their classmates" or whatever... that would be insane. Kids are meant to be loved and grow with care.
Well, guess what, grown ups too. Job or no job. We're not here "in order to make money for the bosses", but just to all contribute in a just and useful manner to society. And so workers need to do their part of the job, but bosses need also to respect the humanity and decency of workers. It goes both ways.
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 students.
I used to run a small factory (two assembly lines 10 people) and something like this would have been useful, not to force people to work harder but to optimise movements and points of friction. I would actively encourage and reward people for making suggestions and we had a process in place to test if changes made things better (and not just faster - we included easier, simpler, more enjoyable etc in the test)
Sadly it’s not about the tool in this case, it’s how it’s being promoted and positioned. The line “know who’s working and who’s not” on their website says it all sadly.
Is 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 could have chosen an example where the solution to the bottleneck didn’t involve berating a low performer (e.g. adjusting the line to add another station or similar)
You mean if they marketed it differently, managers would magically stop using it exactly the way it was advertised?
The product should be marketed as a tool for monitoring and highlighting bottlenecks in the manufacturing production line in order to help maintain peak output. This is a completely reasonable thing to want, it's no different to monitoring micro-services and their latencies/loads.
The video they made however where they berate and meanly put-down an individual employee is so far from acceptable. That's not how personnel performance issues should be managed in the real world, completely void of human empathy. It shows the founders (and did YC view and approve this?) are lacking in areas
This sort of performance management is unfortunately necessary. The problem is that we need tools for it to be built by people who can empathise with those subjected to them, and who want to do the right thing, and not these sorts of folks who are too immature and inexperienced to get it right.
My previous company ran a warehouse and there was a clear bell curve of productivity. Most people were fine, some were excellent, but some were below the level that was realistically achievable. We did careful and considerate analysis and it helped improve productivity.
When done badly however you end up with management using productivity tracking as a lever to increase productivity across the curve. Amazon driver delivery quotas are a great example – people urinating in bottles is clearly a symptom of the quota being too high. Unfortunately software built naively to help bring up the bottom 10% can too easily be used to force up the productivity of the other 90%.
Necessary according to who?
Colleagues, the business. The important things are that performance management is a) used to identify those performing far below what is possible, and b) that there is a good faith effort to support those people to perform better.
Both of these things are mis-handled by many companies, who will use it to encourage more performance out of those who are already as productive as practically possible, and that the tools are used in bad faith or with no intention of helping people, only as an excuse to fire them.
You don’t need constant monitoring to find the bottom 10% though. People performing that badly are easy to pick out with spot checks.
It’s the same with software. Your direct manager should know if their employee is in the bottom 10%. If they don’t, they aren’t doing their job or they have too many reports.
What constant automated monitoring allows is cutting back on the number of managers and like you said, pushing high performers even further.
That depends what you consider monitoring to be. Managers don't just know these things, they aren't walking the floor watching people, they're busy doing things. Their source of knowing these things is often looking at data for the number of things processed, or in some cases failure rates.
You're right that this doesn't need to be constant or even that automated though.
Investors.
Brought to you by the VC famous for InstallMonetizer? Make no mistake, it’ll basically back anything that makes money, there’s no moral high ground. And like it or not, this kind of AI (or should I say A-eye) is here to stay.
That's deeply untrue and unfair, and the fact that you've reached back 12 years to find an example, when YC has funded thousands of startups since then, is evidence against what you're saying.
YC has turned down many startups because they didn't think what the product was doing was right, and it has defunded and banned startups for ethical reasons over the years. It's not your fault that you didn't know this, since no one makes a big deal of it, but I think it's proper to bring it up when you say that the people at YC will "back anything that makes money".
I deeply respect your work here on HN (and I semi-frequently email you so you know I do), but I disagree here. I don’t have to go back 12 years, I think YC funded its fair share of crypto scams like other VCs (of course what’s considered a crypto scam is different for everyone so no point in arguing), but I picked a very well known example that most old users probably know. I should probably mention I commented on a Launch HN thread this month that’s clearly illegal by design: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42886294.
I don’t have much against VCs investing in whatever makes money, to be honest, given how immoral the top dogs of this industry are to begin with, and I can’t claim I haven’t worked in an at least somewhat immoral company.
Edit: I only saw the second paragraph after a refresh. Sure, what I wrote about “back anything that makes money” was inaccurate so I should retract that, but I stand by the “no moral high ground” point.
Ok, I appreciate the reply and am sorry about editing while you were replying. (Sometimes I leave a tag in my comments while I'm still editing them, but I didn't do that this time.)
No problem!
YC is funding weapon manufacturers lol. Where are the ethics there?
People have different views about what is ethical. The HN community, for example, is divided on the ethics of things like weapons manufacturing (a.k.a. "defense companies") or crytpocurrency (mentioned elsewhere in this thread). Having different views about ethics is not the same thing as having no ethics.
Did YC fund (or otherwise back) InstallMonetizer? The way I understood it, they applied to YC with a different idea and worked on IM earlier/on the side/later. (In which case, the controversy was more whether YC works with people who make things like InstallMonetizer.)
> Did YC fund (or otherwise back) InstallMonetizer?
Yes. Quoting Paul Graham:
> Last week there was some controversy online about a company we funded called InstallMonetizer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711
Here's his clarification that followed, saying they didn't fund the product InstallMonetizer:
> They're working on something new, and all the office hours I had with them were about that. They're not even in our database of companies as InstallMonetizer but as the new thing. (I'm not sure if I can say the name because it may not be launched yet.) I knew they had some previous product that was called a Windows installer, but I don't think we ever talked about what it did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093047
The response here would be significantly different if this was about measuring the performance of software engineers in wealthy countries.
I mean… yes, obviously? There’s a lot less room for exploitation of white collar workers in wealthy countries than sweatshops. Though performance quantifying software still deserves a lot of scrutiny for removing humanity from work in any context.
As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine? The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.
I wonder if you'd think differently if your mother was a worker rather than an owner?
It's nuanced. If it allows you to find outliers (low performers to manage and high performers to praise), that's fine. If you try to push everyone further and further to their breaking point and make them trade the same amount of money for more of their time and more importantly health, it's certainly not fine.
Ah ok, my bad then, it's a perfect product and we shouldn't change anything at all then. Let's continue to treat humans as machines, especially in 3rd world countries, who cares right ? Even they say it's fine.
[dead]
>As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine?
People in western countries find things like sweatshops to be objectionable.
>The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.
People in western countries are well aware of how their shirts are made, and don't like it, and try to avoid it when possible specifically because they find sweatshop conditions objectionable.
TBH I'd rather buy shirts where I know that people doing them have been well-treated
The people who worked in these companies are usually incredibly grateful for the opportunity to do seated work indoors for reasonable wages.
Applying Western labour practices to third world countries would prevent them from ever developing...hurting the very people we all want to help.
But the lack of the practices shouldn't give the owners free reign to better themselves more while depleting others in the name of "wanting to help".
Applying those practices to western employment will mean no one can afford what those grateful people make.
No, we know, and we're not okay with it either. I understand it's often an improvement over other options for employment. That makes it understandable and even supportable to some extent, not okay.
Here in the US, we spent centuries fighting and dying for better options. Tools like this are used to launder the dismantling of the results of all that work through a fantasy of objective metrics.
I watched my mother spend 30 years building her company...it's hard enough to build a manufacturing company in 3rd world country. Applying Western labour standards would make it impossible.
The way out of poverty is to through. You need to create enough value to be able to afford the airconed offices where everyone sits on an Aeron with a macbook pro.
I'm sitting on a $70 ikea chair, in a flat reconverted to an office, right under the roof, with no AC and I have 1st gen base model m1
FAANG is an exception, even in the west
Yeah, I was going to say "through to what?"
Enough people have to have enough money to be able to buy the things made in a factory someone's mom spent 30 years on for that factory to exist. These tools are being used to dismantle the "what" people strive for. It's precarity as a service.
> Boost your assembly line efficiency by up to 30%
Ethics of this aside the above claim must be dubious I would think the majority of manufacturing inefficiencies are due to down time as a result of raw material shipping delays or machine break down… of course I’m in no position to offer an informed opinion but just based on the product website I have a hard time taking this stuff seriously.
Monitoring of factory workers isn’t hard to do with current surveillance and 1 or 2 humans in the loop
Software can not abuse workers. Managers can, with our without software.
We've had automated KPI measuring tools since punch clocks. Nowadays it's OK in some companies to install remote access software to monitor employees' screens. It's nothing new. It's just collecting data. Question is, what will bosses do with this data, will they abuse or develop.
I have no hate towards those guys. No love also. It's just business.
The famous it's ok if it's done with algorithm.
> Software can not abuse workers. Managers can, with our without software.
And guns cannot kill people. Other people can, with or without guns. It shouldn’t be hard to understand tools facilitate the task you’re using them for.
> Nowadays it's OK in some companies to install remote access software to monitor employees' screens.
No, it is not OK. It is done, but that doesn’t mean it is right or ethical.
> It's nothing new.
That’s not an excuse to not do better and revise practices.
> It's just business.
See the Nuremberg defence.
I find the marketing interesting considering that this product already exists in other continents ... and it is NOT deployed in factories. It is deployed in office settings. If this our future? Lots of video evidence: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+Using+AI+to+mo... Expect dishonest marketing by those aspiring to build these surveillance and anti-freedom systems in our western countries.
Why not deploy it across every moment of everyone's life, with algorithmic prediction of economically unproductive deviance and BadThink?
Maybe I'll pitch that to someone with money.
That's why we fight for social and worker's rights, try to pull that shit in germany
But for that you need strong unions and I heard it basically is communism, and I heard communism basically is hell on earth, I guess it makes whatever this software is doing heaven
Can anyone share the vision models they might be using and how they might be tuning them?
Thank you, I’ve been seeing the reaction to the announcement but hadn’t yet found the announcement itself.
It's clear there's a large fragment of AI founder types that totally had nobody tell them and I hope they faceplant, hard.
Having been in this industry for a long time now, I see a disappointing trend in tech, and US society in general: viewing everything at zero sum.
I’m probably naive, but I remember in the past tech focusing on innovation that would generate enough gains for everyone to get a share (or at least the gain to the tech company did not come at the expense of someone else)
Now, more and more I see business plans that are zero sum. Using tech to take from someone else, not growing the pie.
This matches a general trend in public life is the US to view everything as a zero sum contest
The secondary school the founder went to is a dead giveaway. Ofcourse yc would fund them. Anyone would fund them infact.
Imagine the features you could add to this. Like a robot that walks around behind the workers and gives well-timed corrective communications with a whip.
The whip is for the programmers.
https://sierraclassicgaming.com/game/space-quest-iii/sq3_pro...
So it appears that automating managers is easier than automating "unskilled workers"
This seems like a tempest in a tea pot. You're automating doing what factory floor managers already do? Hitler! From the title I thought they had developed a robot that flogs 6 year old workers or something.
If I were YC, though, I'd probably have a rule about startups not using "backed by Y Combinator" logos on their homepage like Optifye does. YC's a pretty low touch investor at the seed round level, their startups could do lots of things YC didn't expect, didn't know about, and couldn't prevent.
It seems like there’s been a rash of these instances lately where someone does something, says something, or builds something like this that’s not just offensive but unconscionable. And there’s always the predictable outcry and then usually that’s the end of it.
It’s given me pause to think about why that pattern has been established and I think the simple answer is that there are no consequences. The people we see in the news doing horrific things for attention are doing it because there is no mechanism to hold them accountable. Product launches like this - where it’s explicit purpose is to degrade and exploit humans - happen, meme video and all, because these people will not face any consequences for it (and the potential benefit is massive to them if it takes off).
Yelling and screaming about how horrible it is doesn’t really do anything and it’s not an effective use of time or energy. I wonder what society could do - not conceptually, but practically - to establish consequences for someone who launches a product like this.
That post was pulled partly because of my comment. I commented this:
"While I see the economical usefullness, this sounds like the worst possible application of AI.
Using AI to surveil is building hell on earth. AI should be used to help people work less/easier, not whip them into working more."
Which ended up on the top of the thread. Was surprised to wake up this morning and see it gone.
LinkedIn post I made about this:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-de...
It’s not the only company with low morale that YC is sponsoring. There have been a dozens of copycats shamelessly copying other products, some of them open source.
It is disappointing to see YC going to new levels of bottom without any proper accountability, just greed.
Science sans conscience... we haven't progressed one bit in the last 500 years
No comment really, just came here to remind everyone about, "The Yes Men."
NSFW warning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_bWAF-XxQM
The video features a tear-away business suit to reveal a gold lame stretch suit with a giant, inflatable phallus that has a monitor at the end and controls to let a manager electrocute under performing factory workers from the beach.
This was presented live and in person to an unwitting, but credulous breakout session at the WTO in 2003 to awkward applause.
This product should be banned and these guys should be forced to work a year at a textile mill for trying to build it
I think people are scared this will increase the power of the companies over workers. But a worker’s negotiating position is based on their indispensability and productivity, and on average this won’t change that. I know in reality it's often the fog of war that makes the work bearable. And many good managers more or less consciously keep it that way. But fundamentally, how can more insight and more truth be bad? My resources are limited and I'd rather spend them on a good worker than a slightly worse one. I thought that was the whole point of meritocracy.
My first full-time job out of high school was unloading trucks of coffee and sugar, by hand.
Trust me when I say that the motto on the loading dock is 'fuck me, fuck you'.
This kind of product is really shameful, and peak capitalism... looking at people as mere robots to serve your, disgusting
Nobody looks at people as robots. Robots are cheaper, do not require food or sleep, and do not have to be murdered when they attempt to unionize.
Robots are far superior.
Hm, how do you explain that humans are still working in factories all around the world then ?
Because there are still a lot of things robots simply can't do, like picking items and packaging them. Seems incredibly simple, right? It's not. It's also the reason we won't have self driving vehicles before the collapse of western society.
Not yet for many tasks. Humans are more flexible, easier to replace (nothing to install etc) and one fte in this type of work is 10 years of robot. Hope it will change soon, but it's not there yet.
But then if everyone is out of their job and unemployed ? who will buy the stuff if noone has the money.
I think there is a balance.
Otherwise its going to be 1984 in more than one way (the spying part is already there) (it would also do of that the countries are ready to produce things as much but they won't and limit it to create that constant mood of war to make people not question them / make them weak.)
I think capitalism has fallen. Capitalism is a good system but to its degrees. If you push the accelerator too hard , you get fuedalism.
and we are at feudalism. I am not sure if we can undo this. Let this sink in, the american dream , all our thinkng that capitalism being good and communism being bad fundamentally doesn't matter because we have entered a system where the lines of division are so blurry that they are practically nonexistent.
> But then if everyone is out of their job and unemployed ? who will buy the stuff if noone has the money.
Last time I tried to say something like that I got plenty comments calling me for reading too many sci-fi books... I guess some people just lack imagination and experience with exponentials.
Having a "job" is not some universal good. What people need is resources/needs met. Refusing to buy factory shoes because it puts cobblers out of business is a losing strategy. Better to support the former cobblers needs than to keep forcing them to make shoes.
Except I just want to say that we don't support the cobblers ?
Would they even be cobblers if they are out of business / are heavily impacted by it (like it wipes out 90% cobblers , making their lives actively worse , forcing them to go into the factory lives which actively sucks for them)
I am not sure this is a nuanced topic.
CGP Grey did a video on this topic about 10 years ago. Curious if the video aged well. [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU [video][15 mins][Humans Need Not Apply]
> Curious if the video aged well.
Just watched it, and I would say that it did age very well.
Peak capitalism would have the employees holding their own value and not being crushed in trash power dynamics to allow this kind of stuff. Capitalism is about nonviolent voluntary exchanges between two parties, when one party has a power dynamic skewed in such a way they can use tools like this that employees hate, then that’s not capitalism anymore.
Funny that what you describe will never exist without heavy (extreme?) regulation and progressive taxation, which are anathema to most advocates of capitalism. Have you considered that maybe your definition of capitalism doesn't agree with the definition society has agreed upon?
so this is more like peak feudalism huh?
back to 1800's I suppose.
There is no seperation b/w private entities , the state and the church , all trying to exploit the middle class / lower class was one of the gists that I think when I recall feudalism sounds familiar ? Guess what ? We are living at one right now.
That's approaching "real communism has never been tried".
apologists everywhere are all the same
yes yes true capitalism has never been tried. You realize you're doing the same thing hardline communists do right?
Apparently on their website they're asking for comments/feedback, so... you can tell them yourself what you think of their disgusting tech
> Let us know at founders@optifye.ai, and we’ll help them drop their cortisol levels :)
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We?
Yeah it has terrible optics, yet it's clearly going to be normalized and come. The question is who does it and what is the organization of it. If this company doesn't do it, the next will.
In certain roles, AI micromanagement clearly will create higher performance. Add the marketplace of capitalism and it'll all compete away.
There are certain roles, like artists, where this is the wrong solution wholly: monitoring whether an artist is at her desk will create badly performing artists, and this will show. In these roles, these tools won't apply.
In these roles, these tools won't apply.
There will be companies that will apply them regardless, even in roles where they'll make things worse. The incentive for managers to show 'a bias for action' often results in managers doing any action that they can think of rather than the right action backed by data.
In the US? Sure. In more developed parts of the world? Doubtful. European labor laws are already much, much stronger than their US counterparts, and most countries outright ban using cameras to monitor employees.
> Yeah it has terrible optics, yet it's clearly going to be normalized and come. The question is who does it and what is the organization of it. If this company doesn't do it, the next will.
Where have we seen this before..