Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
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”.
202 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] thread> Let us know at founders@optifye.ai, and we’ll help them drop their cortisol levels :)
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.
Robots are far superior.
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.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU [video][15 mins][Humans Need Not Apply]
Just watched it, and I would say that it did age very well.
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.
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.
Maybe I'll pitch that to someone with money.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
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.
Where have we seen this before..
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.
https://sierraclassicgaming.com/game/space-quest-iii/sq3_pro...
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.
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.
Ask me how many cars I did per day: totally reasonable. Make me clock in and out for every car I work on: bad.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Certain lines are primarily made up of barely functioning older people. No one else sticks around in those jobs. Think barely functioning alcoholic or recovering alcoholics that have nothing. However we would also get a few 18 year olds with no idea how jobs/work works and or zero accountability (they just ghost jobs).
From the numbers we should want to build our processes around the high performers. But we can't expand our base of high performers AND they are the most likely to just disappear and not easily have their productivity replaced.
So yes, it was correct that 10% of our people outperformed by 10X, and yes, it was smart to not try to improve that but to understand reality.
You're failing to retain high performers? Are there perhaps methods for retaining high performers that you have not tried?
AI for Executive performance monitoring would be an interesting social experiment.
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
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.
This is how our society ended up making Amazon delivery workers urinating in fucking bottles inside their trucks.
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1: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
But at least we'll have nice text to speech in the headsets, hopefully.
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.
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.
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
> 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
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 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.
Weapons development is at best helpful as it hopefully provides a deterrent to nefarious actors and at worst protects our interest as Americans if someone caused us to move beyond weapons as a "deterrent."
Pretending like national defense and development of weapons is a bad thing is hiding your head in sand and pretending that there's nobody that wants to hurt you.
Whose? Not mine.
To me, yours is the strange viewpoint. We have nukes and a massive air force. That is the bulk of the deterrence. Use good statesmanship and diplomacy and that covers the rest. Anything else being developed is for political suppression or fueling regional wars and imperial bullshit.
Further you have no evidence to back up your claim that anything outside of the Air Force and nukes are all that are required to properly deter threats.
I would imagine that you also have no credible evidence that "Anything else being developed is for political suppression or fueling regional wars and imperial bullshit."
If you don't want to be involved in developing weapons then that's fine, nobody is forcing you to do so. To claim someone as anti-ethical because they chose to do so in a legal way may be your opinion but surely not a fact.
> YC is funding weapon manufacturers lol. Where are the ethics there?
Circular reasoning? The reason we have a massive and more importantly effective air force is because weapons development occurred. It would not take very long at all for China to surpass the US in terms of air effectiveness if the US stopped working on defense projects.
Further weapon development just fuels arms races and puts the world in a worse place. That is why I find it unethical to fund it.
Also, btw, China already surpassed us despite all our spending. They are defining what a 6th gen fighter is, after all.
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%.
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.
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.
You're right that this doesn't need to be constant or even that automated though.
Quite apart from anything else, this isn't a good argument that this type of performance management is necessary, it's a great argument for firing all the managers in that factory.
If a line doesn't perform, you can solve it without it. Every single time.
Sure, there is not as much market pressure than in general logistics, but I still don't believe you would need these metrics at all.
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.
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.
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.
I have no idea if that’s how they run factories in India but it definitely looks very off from Western perspective. In Europe the assumption would be that workers are trying their best, but they don’t know better. In the video, the assumption is that the workers are cheating or slacking and this tool can help you detect bad actors.
The tool itself at core seems fine though. Any privacy or abuse risks would be up to the legislature and operators to consider but it’s nothing unusual to monitor production lines.
I suspect the purpose of these systems is actually to create a horrible work environment. Not because that is a good thing, but because it'll drive away anyone who has other options and leave you with the most desperate people. Who will also be the cheapest people.
Applying Western labour practices to third world countries would prevent them from ever developing...hurting the very people we all want to help.
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.
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.
FAANG is an exception, even in the west
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.
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.
1. https://yoursustainableguide.com/brands-that-use-sweatshops/ 2. https://whatishappeninginxinjiang.com/brands-linked-to-xinji...
Sweatshops are bad. Westerns know this. They don’t want sweatshops.
Seeing YC back a sweatshop management application that uses AI to help managers harass their workers is sad. It would be similar to them investing in faster slave ships in the 1850s.
I'm not trying to make a decision here on right vs. wrong just pointing out that most people _say_ they care but they're not really willing to do much about it.
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)
If your management tracks your commits/velocity, look for a better job. The market easily allows you to do this. It doesn't make sense anyway and anyone with some technical know-how knows this.
This will escalate into something bad like publication metrics did to science. You end up with superfluous drivel that just pads real discovery. Although for code it is even more trivial.
Bottlenecks are something entirely different. If you have a critical-path, there need to be resources to tackle the task at hand. Real-time monitoring is entirely useless here as well.
Don't most version-control systems support/automate this?
But no, I have never used an environment where velocity is tracked. Of course my source control does provide data how often and what people do commit and you can use that data to create a meaningless number.
Some systems like Jira tracks something like Sprint velocity. Not much of a fan here either, but if used correctly, it is oriented towards a goal. That is the metric you should really track to see if you are still on course.
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
"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...
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
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.
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
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
But now we have current tech businesses basing their future growth strategies as much on better dark patterns as on actual value creation. Imagine a society using their best minds to figure out 'better' dark patterns, and counting the outcome from those patterns as GDP growth. That society is royally f'd on every level.
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.
(See this post I made on LinkedIn about this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-de...)
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.
I'll do that, sure! Dang, I have deep respect for both you and HN for many-many reasons (HN literally changed my life and made it 1000x). So don't take this as me having a grudge. I just like accountability.
> but it does sound like you noticed something that should not have been there.
I don't follow this, sorry.
> I don't follow this, sorry.
Oh, I just meant that it sounds like you spotted something (the video in this case, I assume) that should not have been on an official YC launch page. I was being careful with my wording because I haven't looked at any of the details and haven't myself seen the video—I'm only going by the reactions that people are having to it.
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?
You’d have to be pretty extreme to watch that video and come to the conclusion in the title of this thread. You would only need to have ever seen video before to be like “man these guys didn’t even just google ‘videography tips’”.
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...
"an invention has far more potential negative applications than positive ones."
Emphasis mine. Do you mean to say all inventions have more potential negative uses? Even say a toothbrush? I suppose that could be true, but then you have to look at magnitude of impact and rate of occurrence to see that the potential negative uses like stabbing someone is low.
But it wasn’t designed to, which is the point. The creators had a specific goal in mind, and that goal is exploiting factory workers to the benefit of the owners. This is clear from their written words and video. Like with any tool, the goal influences the design and the design influences how people use it.
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.
I worked at an Indian consulting firm as the only American and experienced this firsthand.
It’s fucking wild. Makes you really appreciate how good some places can be.