Robots also don't play favorites or office politics. If there is a more efficent/better way, it will do it. Even better when it is allowed to re-calculate with new parameters.
That really depends on how the robot has been programmed. It's quite likely that robots in office-type settings will have political aspects to their decision making, at least to the extent that bits of corporate policy have been embedded.
The issue with this is the efficient way is not always the better way.
If you keep assigning the same menial and crappy task to a worker because they get it done quick, yay efficiency! Except if you're asking the same worker to clean the bathrooms three times a day every day, it's not going to take long before he goes "fuck this, I'm going to work somewhere else!"
The robot will assign the next most efficient person, who's going to be right on the train out too and so will everyone who sees it coming. So you'll either end up with people gaming the system and slacking, or you'll end up with an empty business.
People might like the idea of robots because they don't play favourites or office politics. However, I'm willing to bet that people are going to hate that same robot really quick because it doesn't play favourites or office politics.
If you know you can always count on Joe to cover a shift, if he comes and asks you a human for a day off and you know it'll leave you short staffed for a day. Would you? Yes, because you know the 99 other days you're going to end up short staffed you won't because you've got Joe. You know if you say no that you'll be short staffed those other 99 days because Joe's going to make sure he's busy laying on the couch eating cheerios watching jeopardy because you pissed him off.
The worst managers I've personally faced are either the ones that blame everyone else, or the ones who are there to "do a job and not make friends". The latter is the robot.
While you're correct in that bad algorithms will produce bad outcomes, forward thinking companies will improve the algorithms with feedback from the workers.
If previous Lean / Six Sigma studies are correct, this feedback loop will lead to improved employee morale as they become the drivers of decision making and less likely to feel disenfranchised.
A layer of management can be removed and it is mismanagement that generates the most workplace animosity, as you say yourself.
Hopefully over time the system could also optimise retention, if it can correlate being assigned certain tasks often with quitting. You could also have employees fill out satisfaction surveys and weight efficiency with enjoyment, perhaps better employees could be rewarded with more weight given to enjoyment.
Naturally there's going to be more variance in employee performance on some tasks rather than others. For example being a cashier during a quiet time will have less variance than toilet cleaning. A workaround might be to pay a bonus for good performance on high variance tasks.
I'd invert that. You can't complain, whine, or plot social solutions in response to getting assigned tasks by a robot. There's a lower mental load in response to getting a task, since you don't have to worry about how your response to task assignment gets interpreted by your boss.
And I'd invert that: unlike a robot (unless programmed to be cruel), you can see your boss getting off on commanding you to do ridiculous shit. With a robot, you can just think, "Well it's just a brainless robot." With a boss, you think, "Why doesn't that glib asshole use their brain... or better yet, let me use mine?"
(Pardon if my language seems salty; "asshole" and "shit" are actually popular technical terms when dealing with the domain of bosses.)
DonHopkins|11 years ago
_delirium|11 years ago
sgy|11 years ago
electromagnetic|11 years ago
If you keep assigning the same menial and crappy task to a worker because they get it done quick, yay efficiency! Except if you're asking the same worker to clean the bathrooms three times a day every day, it's not going to take long before he goes "fuck this, I'm going to work somewhere else!"
The robot will assign the next most efficient person, who's going to be right on the train out too and so will everyone who sees it coming. So you'll either end up with people gaming the system and slacking, or you'll end up with an empty business.
People might like the idea of robots because they don't play favourites or office politics. However, I'm willing to bet that people are going to hate that same robot really quick because it doesn't play favourites or office politics.
If you know you can always count on Joe to cover a shift, if he comes and asks you a human for a day off and you know it'll leave you short staffed for a day. Would you? Yes, because you know the 99 other days you're going to end up short staffed you won't because you've got Joe. You know if you say no that you'll be short staffed those other 99 days because Joe's going to make sure he's busy laying on the couch eating cheerios watching jeopardy because you pissed him off.
The worst managers I've personally faced are either the ones that blame everyone else, or the ones who are there to "do a job and not make friends". The latter is the robot.
hayksaakian|11 years ago
Retention is something you could optimize for in the long term.
Reliability for covering shifts is a number too.
I think you're right on a small scale, humans can make generally reasonable judgement calls with little data.
If you think about the future though, if a big corp can optimize middle management robots with 100,000 employees worth of data, they probably will.
SixSigma|11 years ago
If previous Lean / Six Sigma studies are correct, this feedback loop will lead to improved employee morale as they become the drivers of decision making and less likely to feel disenfranchised.
A layer of management can be removed and it is mismanagement that generates the most workplace animosity, as you say yourself.
jiggy2011|11 years ago
Naturally there's going to be more variance in employee performance on some tasks rather than others. For example being a cashier during a quiet time will have less variance than toilet cleaning. A workaround might be to pay a bonus for good performance on high variance tasks.
ThrustVectoring|11 years ago
calibraxis|11 years ago
(Pardon if my language seems salty; "asshole" and "shit" are actually popular technical terms when dealing with the domain of bosses.)