'Hey Number 17 '

https://www.404media.co/email/b7eb2339-2ea1-4a37-96cc-a360494c214c/

by Amorymeltzer • 1 year ago

424 157 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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).

WarOnPrivacy2• 1 year ago

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.

ashoeafoot5• 1 year ago

Man, you would make a excellent role for a hollywood version of Dantes Inferno.

IncandescentGas2• 1 year ago

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.

IncandescentGas2• 1 year ago

=~ s/server/serve/ :D

sweeter• 1 year ago

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?

WarOnPrivacy2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

itronitron3• 1 year ago

Improving efficiency in a system generally reduces it's resilience, so improving efficiency is definitely not always a good thing.

dieselgate2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

... 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!"

dieselgate2• 1 year ago

That’s hilarious hadn’t heard that one before ;)

speak_plainly• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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!

ryandrake7• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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)

johnnyanmac8• 1 year ago

A real shame we don't do both. In addition to a general Teamwork class in the psych department (which did involve some ethics), I took a dedicated class for software ethics. It may have been straightforward for many, but as someone who was only exposed to tech (as a career) in high school it made me realize that code isn't just thos pile of legos to break and rearrange.Even non-critical business can cost lives if they are irresponsible with what they build.

readthenotes1• 1 year ago

Reminds of the hinges scene in Schindler's List

https://youtu.be/I-yLk8SZAJY?feature=shared

uoaei2• 1 year ago

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.

LoganDark2• 1 year ago

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.

uoaei2• 1 year ago

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.

Etheryte• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

theamk2• 1 year ago

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.

fragmede3• 1 year ago

wdym if?

johnnyanmac8• 1 year ago

Will those regulations help with non-AI version of the same?

No, but it adds friction and slows down the corruption. Sometimes that can be just as important as making long term preventative measurements.

Aveng1991• 1 year ago

This form or efficiency enforcement is already a wildly practiced method in apparel manufacturing. What you need is a performance metric form and a pen and one supervisor to monitor the unit. Additionally a white board in public display with each worker’s hourly output also works.

A better method of efficiency is also commonly practiced by some factories, which is to pay per unit. This practice ties the earning to the output and is far more efficient. Workers do feel in control and can earn 3X - 4X if they were on monthly salary. However this method is skill oriented and many not be practical all the time, plus it can be a little costly.

The assembly line method is a cheaper alternative, since it forfeits the need for every workers to be equally skilled. The downside to this method is that inefficiency can easily creep in.

HenryBemis4• 1 year ago

GDPR also makes this practically impossible:

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

phillipcarter2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

phillipcarter2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

itronitron3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

well the iPhones won't make themselves

makeitdouble2• 1 year ago

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/

causal• 1 year ago

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!

makeitdouble2• 1 year ago

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.

minimaxir2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

imglorp• 1 year ago

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?

HenryBemis4• 1 year ago

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.

ashoeafoot5• 1 year ago

Intelligence implies belligerence

noah_buddy• 1 year ago

Quite literally never. Society and civilization, from the earliest days, has been a story of subjugation of a lower class by a higher class. Technology and force have enabled this.

How else could you compel a farmworking class to provide for other segments of the society?

suraci• 1 year ago

I'm sure China and India will like GDPR if they can use paper money to purchase industrial products and natural resources from the EU and North America

krapp• 1 year ago

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.

PTGreat• 1 year ago

Luddites

A group who, contrary to popular belief, were not 'anti-technology'.

The fact they campaigned for unemployment support and re-training for workers displaced by the new technologies probably makes the Luddites amongst the most forward thinking and progressive people of the industrial revolution!

ChrisArchitect2• 1 year ago

[dupe] Lots of discussion earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170850

RIMR• 1 year ago

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.

ChrisArchitect2• 1 year ago

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.

ryandrake7• 1 year ago

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_random7• 1 year ago

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.

gowld4• 1 year ago

"a personal moral failing" of the worker who is being exploited, of course. Not the exploiter watching the worker.

theamk2• 1 year ago

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.

gowld4• 1 year ago

Why is charisma needed? The snake is selling to other snakes. The victims aren't stakeholders.

darkwater2• 1 year ago

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.

ryandrake7• 1 year ago

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.

ashoeafoot5• 1 year ago

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.

some_random7• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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)

tqi3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

The part that is new is technology making things worse. To me that qualifies as a technology story.

madeofpalk• 1 year ago

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.

minimaxir2• 1 year ago

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_random7• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

to make money

steve_adams_86• 1 year ago

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.

guy4261• 1 year ago

what they're designing the software for

They are designing it to sell. Their potential buyers are sociopaths just like them. These buyers, in turn, will also not benefit from the software, but I do imagine it would sell nicely. SNAFU.

gunian2• 1 year ago

lmao mask off

energy123• 1 year ago

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.

pjmlp3• 1 year ago

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

cantrecallmypwd• 1 year ago

Yup. Panopticon surveillance. It's near the end stage of technofedualism apart from replacing workers entirely with robots and AI. When all (defacto all/most) of the jobs are optimized away such that no one has skills businesses want, what then? Does Earth become a giant favela ruled by a dozen trillionaires with a tiny supporting bourgeoisie? At some point, the hoarding of money becomes absolutely pointless except to sustain the power and control of the many by a few evil people.

thefz• 1 year ago

This easily could have been spun in a positive light,

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

dakial1• 1 year ago

Or, the guy could be congratulating an employee performing well and discovering a new best practice for the job.

Same tech, better value communication to all stakeholders

fullshark• 1 year ago

The upcoming AI powered laborer surveillance will not stop at sweatshop employees btw.

neilv4• 1 year ago

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_random7• 1 year ago

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.

neilv4• 1 year ago

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.

itronitron3• 1 year ago

"they're not confessing, they're bragging"

mattgreenrocks• 1 year ago

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).

ryandrake7• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

pjmlp3• 1 year ago

The irony being that they will put themselves out of work instead.

Well most of us, when software development automation becomes good enough, we will be the new factory workers queuing for food tickets, while a few lucky ones get to be those in charge of the software factory.

gowld4• 1 year ago

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."

HenryBemis4• 1 year ago

GDPR doesn't allow any of that garbage.

jagged-chisel• 1 year ago

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.

ashoeafoot5• 1 year ago

To feed your kids, to then feed them into the orphan crusher ,is that not reward enough? Are we not merciful?

krunck• 1 year ago

"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_random7• 1 year ago

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

morkalork• 1 year ago

Well you know what they say, you can lead a horse to water

jrussino2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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“.

miles• 1 year ago

...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!

Reminded of this line from chapter 13 of Mitchell's freehand Tao Te Ching translation[1]:

Whether you go up the ladder or down it, you position is shaky.

[1] https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:sm/section:13

keiferski• 1 year ago

Great quote. It’s from Adams though - a perennially under appreciated president.

https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...

404mm• 1 year ago

F! those two in particular.

Workaccount23• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

fragmede3• 1 year ago

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.

Workaccount23• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

That's exactly what they do, which is why the minimum wage is such a destructive policy.

JohnFen• 1 year ago

Low wage labor is not very valuable at all

If all the low wage laborers stopped working, society would stop functioning. Sounds pretty valuable to me.

arp242• 1 year ago

I'm sure that's true for some industries and businesses, but obviously not true for all. Lots of very profitable companies employ low wage labourers (either directly, or as is often the case, indirectly). Nike had $5.7 billion net income.

But even if everything you say is true, we can still refer to these people as something slightly more humanizing than "number 17", and generally treat with a basic minimum of respect ("are you okay, work seems to have slower down" rather than immediately jumping to bollocking mode).

Productivity monitoring for factory workers is nothing new, or even controversial as such, but having a camera pointed directly at your face all day that your supervisors can monitor is pretty invasive (never mind that this is just the "bum on seat" type of "productivity").

claudiulodro• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Late-stage capitalism is watching the movie "THX-1138" and getting inspired to write a YC pitch.

4ndrewl• 1 year ago

Imagine what it would be like working for these pricks.

dusted• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

bubblethink• 1 year ago

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

zafka• 1 year ago

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......

gunian2• 1 year ago

i like when we pretend the nsa doesnt have all this data already and systems that make 1984 look like a Show HN :)

Alifatisk• 1 year ago

This is the second time I've seen YCombinator invest in something controversial. First was the PearAI and now Optifye, there must be more.

nojvek• 1 year ago

Wow! that twitter video https://x.com/AdamLerman5/status/1894215433366245457

What were they thinking?

Reminds me of 1984. Ministry of Peace = Department of War. Ministry of Plenty = Keep state in artificial scarcity.

All the AI techbros about AI gonna revolutionize the world and bring abundance = we're gonna make lives miserable for the 99%, and make ourselves billionaires.

sentrysapper• 1 year ago

I wonder if Kushal Mohta and Vivaan Baid have ever read the story of the Brazen Bull.

BurdensomeCount• 1 year ago

Terrible as these people may be, even they do not deserve the Brazen Bull (nobody does).

'Hey Number 17 '

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