Posted on 03/03/2020 2:33:22 PM PST by Twotone
On conference stages and at campaign rallies, tech executives and politicians warn of a looming automation crisis — one where workers are gradually, then all at once, replaced by intelligent machines. But their warnings mask the fact that an automation crisis has already arrived. The robots are here, they’re working in management, and they’re grinding workers into the ground.
The robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. They’re managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and scrolls and docking their pay if they work too slowly. They’re listening to call center workers, telling them what to say, how to say it, and keeping them constantly, maximally busy. While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager.
These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment’s downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous. Over the last several months, I’ve spoken with more than 20 workers in six countries. For many of them, their greatest fear isn’t that robots might come for their jobs: it’s that robots have already become their boss.
In few sectors are the perils of automated management more apparent than at Amazon.
(Excerpt) Read more at theverge.com ...
SAP
Mathematical algorithms control many things in the workplace,
in inventory control, in stock market trades, etc., etc.
I once worked for a company where they would write you up and ultimately fire you for being below average. They wouldn’t listen when I told them there will ALWAYS be workers that are below average. They didn’t understand what average really is.
You want socialism? You want communism?
THIS is how you’re gonna get it.
Such practices will give the average person such a bad taste in their mouth for capitalism they’ll go into open revolt.
I worked in a textile mill in the late 60’s-early 70’s...
Everyone there worked on “the piece rate”.
(paid by the yard)
Worse will be our skill atrophy as they enslave us to be unable to survive without them
I wonder how those who put others under the robot microscope (so to speak) would like it if the same was applied to them...
I once worked for a company where they would write you up and ultimately fire you for being below average. They wouldn’t listen when I told them there will ALWAYS be workers that are below average. They didn’t understand what average really is.
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The only place that system would work is Lake Wobegone
Alas! My robot got chromavirus and died.
.
Very true.
Thank you for posting this.
This is clearly what is happening where I work. The work, itself, is being redefined to match what the software can metric.
I was thinking of it as lazy management, but it really is automated management.
I don’t think that what needs to be done will actually get done, this new way. But, I don’t think that anybody cares. The work is being outsourced, anyway, so the software metrics are undoubtably just to justify layoffs.
You human will do as you are told or you will be squashed!
Time to boycott stores that have automated tellers. Go to the cashiers don’t use the self checkoutcounter counters.
If we boycotted every store that was called out on FR, the only option would be Goodwill and St Vincent de Paul Thrift.
“I once worked for a company where they would write you up and ultimately fire you for being below average.”
Is there actually a Company that doesn’t do that? I sort of know what you mean but management lingo for what you are calling below average is basically “does not meet the group standard”.
My experience before I retired from the pressure cooker job I used to have is that everyone was a high achiever or you wouldn’t be there to begin with. There were degrees of achievement and your pay reflected that. If someone was considered “below average” or not within the expected range of achievement — then they didn’t last long. Those people were gone in next workforce reductions.
This incentive structure worked and all of us hussled to make sure we were not on the bottom. If someone doesn’t like that sort of thing I guess you find some job that is more forgiving if they jobs exist anymore.
“Fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n auf die Autobahn...”
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