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Y Combinator Supports AI Startup Dehumanizing Factory Workers
Submitted 5 weeks ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.404media.co/optifyeai-ycombinator-startup-ai-factory/
Comments
gladflag@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
darkkite@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
kinda is surprising. do they really have history in doing this?
gladflag@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
I’m unsurprised that a venture capital company is dehumanising workers.
MCasq_qsaCJ_234@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
I wish Trump, Elon and their gang had it so they would realize that being efficient at work screws up your life.
tal@lemmy.today 5 weeks ago
In most cases, I’d guess that factories don’t need cameras or AI image analysis to track output, because workers aren’t simply putting their output into a single pool with the output of other workers. The factory already has an easy way to know how much output the worker is producing, and, no doubt, has a record of that.
There might be fields of work where that’s not the case, where it’s hard to know what any one worker is actually producing. But I’m dubious that it’s gonna be people doing assembly work in a factory.
There might be more-valuable uses to record and analyze workers in a factory. I remember that in Cheaper by the Dozen, the father works as a motion efficiency consultant – was in the heyday of US doing assembly-line factory work, and he’d go in with a video camera, record workers working, and then break down how workers were working and see if there were different motions that workers could be trained to use to increase output.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study
But I’m skeptical that trying to find workers who aren’t producing output in a factory using AI vision stuff is going to be all that useful.
stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Time and motion studies can be incredibly effective. My company once wanted to automate some processes and sent me down there to watch the workers and identify the processes we could automate. Talking with the workers and filming a few of them gave me all the information to save well over $1M per year just by making the current process more efficient. Literally cost some people’s time to do the analysis, change some documentation and validate the improvements. Even the workers were happy because they had less waiting around for things to happen and were part of the process.