'Hey Number 17 '

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.

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.

> 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.

Why is so much attention being given to the spin they put on it, rather than the underlying technology (24/7 monitoring) which causes hypervigilance, alienation from work, chronic stress, fear, paranoia, and all the consequential negative health impacts? I don't care if the company spins it in a good or bad way, the spin is completely irrelevant.

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?

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.

> This easily could have been spun in a positive light,

Spin all you want, there's no sugarcoating this orwellian aberration

Basically modern slavery, they were missing a whip robot there as well, and maybe a drum playing robot.

> 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.

F! those two in particular.

Glad to see that their mandatory ethics and liberal arts classes have instilled empathetic and humanist values in them.

> 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.

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!

well the iPhones won't make themselves

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.

GDPR also makes this practically impossible:

  a camera pointed straight at your face every working moment
  profiling
  use of AI

What the article describes is already very very hard to achieve legally under GDPR. I don't think new regulations are required.

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.

Many people, like the Luddites, saw through the con ages ago. But people will still parrot the lie that technology and automation (AI in the modern context) will free the working class to live lives of intellectual pursuit and leisure to this day, when the goal of both is the opposite.

It should come as a surprise to nobody that a venture capital firm is Bad, Actually.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Missed opportunity. The actors use so many words when sending Rover to the underperforming worker would do the job.

> 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.

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.

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.

And now you see them. Real, old world societies , with castes and strata ,where the royalty looks down on the peasants while paying lipservice to western idea. China, india, the middle east, russia. Welcome to the desert of the real.