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Reading this, I'm so glad that in all of the EU it is illegal to fire someone purely based on a software decision. There's a minimum level of humanity that we s

Reading this, I'm so glad that in all of the EU it is illegal to fire someone purely based on a software decision. There's a minimum level of humanity that we should extend to everyone. Letting a known faulty AI decide if someone will have money for food tomorrow is way across the line. I'm not surprised that treating humans like cattle on their way to slaughter is hugely profitable. But I'm not sure we want to operate large companies like WW2 prisoner camps. Even if you truly don't care about the poor souls who have to work there, the people who turn insane from this treatment will still live in your country and maybe their kids will meet your kids in school and "educate" them on the cruelty of life. It's best not to push anyone down the mental abyss in the first place. And yet, here we (software developers) are, developing new monitoring and automation systems and deciding to delete someone's entire online life (Google account) without any oversight (AI) in the name of "efficiency" (higher profits for shareholders that we never met and never will).

golergka 5y ago
> Reading this, I'm so glad that in all of the EU it is illegal to fire someone purely based on a software decision. Why do people treat working for a company as something different from selling any other services or goods? If there was a law that limited your ability to cancel a gym membership or going to a different supermarket, you would rightfully object — it's not a government's business to get involved in your voluntary business transactions. Why treat a company that hires workers differently?
- kleiba 5y ago
  Your limited ability to cancel a gym membership is an important part of any gym's business model, at least where I live: it bets on people's impulse decision (say, at the beginning of a new year) to get in shape, a desire which often tapers off after a few weeks or months. But if your gym contract has a minimum duration of, say, two years, whether you go there or not, you pay.
- kleiba 5y ago
  The way it is commonly seen is that workers deserve special protection through the law to make up for the inherent power imbalance between those who employ and those who are employed.
  - sneak 5y ago
    This is often repeated, but I don't understand it. What power imbalance? The ability to offer a job is only a power over a worker if the worker has no other options for jobs, which is only the case in a company town or something like that. Then the company gets to decide if the worker starves or not. The labor market in the US is highly liquid, even for unskilled workers. This described power imbalance simply does not exist.
    - _Algernon_ 5y ago
      >The labor market in the US is highly liquid, even for unskilled workers. This described power imbalance simply does not exist. Yes it does. See Amazon preventing workers from unionising.
    - Yoric 5y ago
      I'm not familiar enough with the situation in the US to comment for what's happening on your side of the ocean. In my country, there are laws to protect both sides. Unless an agreement is negotiated, the employee cannot leave without giving a ~2 months notice, the employer cannot fire/layoff withing giving a ~2 months notice. In many cases, though, there is a strong power imbalance. If, for some reason, you decide to sue your (former) employer, or if your (former) employer decides to sue you, you most likely cannot afford the same budget for lawyering up as they can. Also, your main power against your employer (besides possibly unions) is, as you mention, the ability to change job, but that only works when changing job is possible. Both for highly skilled positions and unskilled positions, getting a new job is hard and may require you to move to a new place - something that you may not be able to do if you have children or a working spouse. As anecdotal examples, I know former C*Os of influential companies who have been working make up jobs for several years because they cannot find anything matching their skills, even at much reduced salaries. I know burnt out teachers who do not leave their jobs because nothing matches their skills. I have several friends in IT, or in admin positions, or with lawyer degrees who just cannot find anything or could not find anything for years because they happen to live in the wrong place and cannot leave because that would cost their spouse a job or they would abandon elders, etc. Having myself changed (HN-style) jobs a few times, I can confirm that it's long and certainly not easy, in particular when you also need, at the same time, to care for a young child, or a sick family member, or when you're burnt out, or depressed by a personal crisis, or by the rejections you encounter from potential employers, or by the institutional bullying on unemployed people. I imagine it's even harder as you get older - I'm not looking forward to be labelled too-old-for-HN-style-jobs. All of that is in a G7 country whose unemployment rate is decreasing. Testimonies from friends in neighbouring countries make me feel that it's even worse in many places. Testimonies from friends in the US make me feel it's not as rosy as you describe, at least not in all fields/regions. So... yeah, I believe that there is a power imbalance. You may be in a field and/or location in which you do not witness it, and if this is your case, I'm happy for you. But for many people, it exists.
- menzoic 5y ago
  You can't compare selling goods to employing people in that way. Consider the fact that there are humans on both sides. Businesses can use their power to abuse employees in a way that can't be done to goods. If you are the main source of income for a person, you have massive influence over them. Government creates laws to balance the power. There are countless cases of abuse by employers including physical and sexual. Very different from selling goods or having a gym membership.
- oblio 5y ago
  Because a company has tens, hundreds or thousands of employees. Employees generally have 1 job (at a time) and 1 career. It's really hard for an employee to screw over a company for good and trivial for companies to completely destroy an employee's career and life. The asymmetry needs to be counterbalanced actively, especially since companies can have people on their payroll 24/7 to fight for more company rights. Employees can't afford that.
- herbst 5y ago
  I personally don't care, but for all the people living from paycheck to paycheck in a low wage job this is the bare minimum of security they would want from their job. It's important to note that the company gets help from the state shouldn't they be able to pay their workers. So it's not only enforced on the employers but backed by the state
- pjc50 5y ago
  Humans are humans. Companies are not humans.
- dtech 5y ago
  A gym deciding to cancel someones membership is a minor nuisance for them, a company deciding to fire someone has potentially life-changing consequences. Remember that for you as - I am assuming - an IT professional getting a new job is easy, for lots of professions not so much.
- jhoechtl 5y ago
  In many EU jurisdictions being employed means you owe the employer the willingness to accomplish a result not the actual result. Germany is known that once you are in an active work relationship its difficult to get fired. So yes, there is a difference as it is generally frowned upon these days to call people a resource which implies an interchangeable unit of work force.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  First of all, have an upvote, which is both the agree and disagree button, as long as a person contributes to the conversation. Next, I think you are contributing, because companies really, truly operate as if people were flesh robots and your perspective, rather than being trolling, is actually dominant in corporations. Thirdly, that you could potentially have accepted the narrative that we are fleshbots, ready for exploitation, no different than any other raw material and not needing any more care or consideration than cattle or cotton says something deeply disturbing things about the state of humanism.
  - Yoric 5y ago
    > First of all, have an upvote, which is both the agree and disagree button, as long as a person contributes to the conversation. It's a shame that HN makes no difference between "what you're writing has no place here" and "I disagree with you" I remember discussing with people who were experimenting with this kind of mechanism for comments on newspaper websites, but I believe that this hasn't had much success.
- tremon 5y ago
  What a weird question. I could similarly ask, why do people treat employing workers as something different from animal husbandry? If there was a law that limited your ability to ship, cage or breed your workers like you do cattle, you would rightfully object -- it's not a government's business to get involved in your voluntary business transactions. Why treat a company that employs workers differently from a company that employs cattle? Your question has as much relevance to the question at hand as mine.
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    To be fair, livestock do not consent to being livestock.
  - golergka 5y ago
    Because humans deserve the right to freedom to accept or deny any voluntary contract. Which legislation that we're talking about is directly infringing on. Just as people should be able to not accept having being treated like cattle, they should be able to accept any form of employment contract if they so choose: it is exactly the same issue.
- pitkali 5y ago
  Probably because people's livelihoods depend on employment and they have much less power on the markets as individuals than companies.
yanderekko 5y ago
>Letting a known faulty AI decide if someone will have money for food tomorrow is way across the line. So is the implication here that humans are less faulty, or that there's something intrinsically wrong about an AI making this decision rather than a human? If the former, then this is an issue that the technology will probably eventually solve. If the latter, well... that doesn't seem very justifiable, to say the least. If Amazon has leaned too far in the direction of automation without oversight, then we'll see other firms fail to adopt these same practices. But it seems pretty inevitable to me that we'll see many more AI-driven hiring/firing decisions in 10 years or so than fewer. And if some sclerotic regulations try to slow this down, that will likely be unfortunate for consumers.
- _djo_ 5y ago
  No, the implication is that we believe that these algorithms are non-faulty and therefore throw away all the provisions for recourse and review that exist with human-driven systems. There is no nuance, no leeway, and no way for you to reason your case with a thinking human on the other side of the decision. The algorithms & systems are also almost always completely opaque in their workings, with neither the person on the receiving end nor the company's staff having any insight into why they made decisions or what data was used. Using algorithms for life-affecting decisions like this would not be nearly as bad if you had a reasonable ability to appeal and have the decision be taken as final. It doesn't even have to be AI, or an algorithm. The British Post Office Horizon scandal is an example of lives ruined by an assumption that accounting software could never be wrong.
  - pmelendez 5y ago
    >No, the implication is that we believe that these algorithms are non-faulty I think that falls under OC's argument and it seems eventually solvable. Still, what you are pointing is a human bias. Humans have been taking similar unfair decisions without possibility for recourse or review since forever, so it would be interesting to have a review mechanism in general.
    - _djo_ 5y ago
WalterBright 5y ago
People have historically complained a lot about firings not being based on an objective formula. Now the complaint is an objective formula is being used. > WW2 prisoner camps For starters, those camps would shoot anyone who tried to leave. Not the same thing at all.
- polskibus 5y ago
  I'd argue that if a process does not have room for you to explain yourself, and ensure that ALL data is taken into consideration by the other side then such process is authoritarian and not objective. An algorithm only looks at data it was programmed to look at, which is usually too narrow to be able to be without faults in the real world. There are good reasons why judicial systems have higher instances in them to which you can appeal to if you don't agree with lower instance.
  - Cederfjard 5y ago
    >An algorithm only looks at data it was programmed to look at Programmed, or even worse trained, which means there’s no general intelligence around that really understands why it does what it does.
- apexalpha 5y ago
  I think the point is that to the AI, an employee is just a number. Interchangeable at any moment, with no consideration for the human person and how it affects them.
  - syshum 5y ago
    So if you have 2 Programmers, One is Single has FIRE plan to early retirement, and expense to income ratio of 25%.. Another programmer has 4 kids, lives pay check to paycheck, and has a wife with a medical condition... The dept has to be downsized by 1 programmer, both programmers have the same income, the single programmer is slightly more productive.. Should the single programmer should be fired over the other because of there personal life situation?
- 5y ago
skrebbel 5y ago
> like WW2 prisoner camps FWIW I think your comment would've been more powerful without the Godwin.
intricatedetail 5y ago
Why the AI sidesteps responsibility? It's like stabbing someone with a screwdriver and saying screwdriver did it! Are regulators in the US that dumb or corrupt to allow it?
deregulateMed 5y ago
I was a bit too ambitious/hard working, and a coworker made it her mission to get rid of me. After 2 years she succeeded. I admittedly didn't care because I got a higher paying job in a better field, but I'll take AI over office politics.
- declnz 5y ago
  Yes - but this isn't an either/or situation...
venkat223 5y ago
For not working and being their own self they are not hired.The lower level workers were not adopting the e-commerce discipline of promptness.We require JBezos like monitoring and action.
goodpoint 5y ago
"the software said so" is 2020's way to denying something to someone while also trying to deflect blame. Not very different from "not financially viable", "your health insurance have expired", "your credit score does not meet the requirements". The decision of implementing such rules and methods and use such phrasing is entirely done by humans.

golergka 5y ago

> Reading this, I'm so glad that in all of the EU it is illegal to fire someone purely based on a software decision. Why do people treat working for a company as something different from selling any other services or goods? If there was a law that limited your ability to cancel a gym membership or going to a different supermarket, you would rightfully object — it's not a government's business to get involved in your voluntary business transactions. Why treat a company that hires workers differently?

kleiba 5y ago
Your limited ability to cancel a gym membership is an important part of any gym's business model, at least where I live: it bets on people's impulse decision (say, at the beginning of a new year) to get in shape, a desire which often tapers off after a few weeks or months. But if your gym contract has a minimum duration of, say, two years, whether you go there or not, you pay.
kleiba 5y ago
The way it is commonly seen is that workers deserve special protection through the law to make up for the inherent power imbalance between those who employ and those who are employed.
- sneak 5y ago
  This is often repeated, but I don't understand it. What power imbalance? The ability to offer a job is only a power over a worker if the worker has no other options for jobs, which is only the case in a company town or something like that. Then the company gets to decide if the worker starves or not. The labor market in the US is highly liquid, even for unskilled workers. This described power imbalance simply does not exist.
  - _Algernon_ 5y ago
    >The labor market in the US is highly liquid, even for unskilled workers. This described power imbalance simply does not exist. Yes it does. See Amazon preventing workers from unionising.
  - Yoric 5y ago
    I'm not familiar enough with the situation in the US to comment for what's happening on your side of the ocean. In my country, there are laws to protect both sides. Unless an agreement is negotiated, the employee cannot leave without giving a ~2 months notice, the employer cannot fire/layoff withing giving a ~2 months notice. In many cases, though, there is a strong power imbalance. If, for some reason, you decide to sue your (former) employer, or if your (former) employer decides to sue you, you most likely cannot afford the same budget for lawyering up as they can. Also, your main power against your employer (besides possibly unions) is, as you mention, the ability to change job, but that only works when changing job is possible. Both for highly skilled positions and unskilled positions, getting a new job is hard and may require you to move to a new place - something that you may not be able to do if you have children or a working spouse. As anecdotal examples, I know former C*Os of influential companies who have been working make up jobs for several years because they cannot find anything matching their skills, even at much reduced salaries. I know burnt out teachers who do not leave their jobs because nothing matches their skills. I have several friends in IT, or in admin positions, or with lawyer degrees who just cannot find anything or could not find anything for years because they happen to live in the wrong place and cannot leave because that would cost their spouse a job or they would abandon elders, etc. Having myself changed (HN-style) jobs a few times, I can confirm that it's long and certainly not easy, in particular when you also need, at the same time, to care for a young child, or a sick family member, or when you're burnt out, or depressed by a personal crisis, or by the rejections you encounter from potential employers, or by the institutional bullying on unemployed people. I imagine it's even harder as you get older - I'm not looking forward to be labelled too-old-for-HN-style-jobs. All of that is in a G7 country whose unemployment rate is decreasing. Testimonies from friends in neighbouring countries make me feel that it's even worse in many places. Testimonies from friends in the US make me feel it's not as rosy as you describe, at least not in all fields/regions. So... yeah, I believe that there is a power imbalance. You may be in a field and/or location in which you do not witness it, and if this is your case, I'm happy for you. But for many people, it exists.
menzoic 5y ago
You can't compare selling goods to employing people in that way. Consider the fact that there are humans on both sides. Businesses can use their power to abuse employees in a way that can't be done to goods. If you are the main source of income for a person, you have massive influence over them. Government creates laws to balance the power. There are countless cases of abuse by employers including physical and sexual. Very different from selling goods or having a gym membership.
oblio 5y ago
Because a company has tens, hundreds or thousands of employees. Employees generally have 1 job (at a time) and 1 career. It's really hard for an employee to screw over a company for good and trivial for companies to completely destroy an employee's career and life. The asymmetry needs to be counterbalanced actively, especially since companies can have people on their payroll 24/7 to fight for more company rights. Employees can't afford that.
herbst 5y ago
I personally don't care, but for all the people living from paycheck to paycheck in a low wage job this is the bare minimum of security they would want from their job. It's important to note that the company gets help from the state shouldn't they be able to pay their workers. So it's not only enforced on the employers but backed by the state
pjc50 5y ago
Humans are humans. Companies are not humans.
dtech 5y ago
A gym deciding to cancel someones membership is a minor nuisance for them, a company deciding to fire someone has potentially life-changing consequences. Remember that for you as - I am assuming - an IT professional getting a new job is easy, for lots of professions not so much.
jhoechtl 5y ago
In many EU jurisdictions being employed means you owe the employer the willingness to accomplish a result not the actual result. Germany is known that once you are in an active work relationship its difficult to get fired. So yes, there is a difference as it is generally frowned upon these days to call people a resource which implies an interchangeable unit of work force.
dougmwne 5y ago
First of all, have an upvote, which is both the agree and disagree button, as long as a person contributes to the conversation. Next, I think you are contributing, because companies really, truly operate as if people were flesh robots and your perspective, rather than being trolling, is actually dominant in corporations. Thirdly, that you could potentially have accepted the narrative that we are fleshbots, ready for exploitation, no different than any other raw material and not needing any more care or consideration than cattle or cotton says something deeply disturbing things about the state of humanism.
- Yoric 5y ago
  > First of all, have an upvote, which is both the agree and disagree button, as long as a person contributes to the conversation. It's a shame that HN makes no difference between "what you're writing has no place here" and "I disagree with you" I remember discussing with people who were experimenting with this kind of mechanism for comments on newspaper websites, but I believe that this hasn't had much success.
tremon 5y ago
What a weird question. I could similarly ask, why do people treat employing workers as something different from animal husbandry? If there was a law that limited your ability to ship, cage or breed your workers like you do cattle, you would rightfully object -- it's not a government's business to get involved in your voluntary business transactions. Why treat a company that employs workers differently from a company that employs cattle? Your question has as much relevance to the question at hand as mine.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  To be fair, livestock do not consent to being livestock.
- golergka 5y ago
  Because humans deserve the right to freedom to accept or deny any voluntary contract. Which legislation that we're talking about is directly infringing on. Just as people should be able to not accept having being treated like cattle, they should be able to accept any form of employment contract if they so choose: it is exactly the same issue.
pitkali 5y ago
Probably because people's livelihoods depend on employment and they have much less power on the markets as individuals than companies.

yanderekko 5y ago

>Letting a known faulty AI decide if someone will have money for food tomorrow is way across the line. So is the implication here that humans are less faulty, or that there's something intrinsically wrong about an AI making this decision rather than a human? If the former, then this is an issue that the technology will probably eventually solve. If the latter, well... that doesn't seem very justifiable, to say the least. If Amazon has leaned too far in the direction of automation without oversight, then we'll see other firms fail to adopt these same practices. But it seems pretty inevitable to me that we'll see many more AI-driven hiring/firing decisions in 10 years or so than fewer. And if some sclerotic regulations try to slow this down, that will likely be unfortunate for consumers.

_djo_ 5y ago
No, the implication is that we believe that these algorithms are non-faulty and therefore throw away all the provisions for recourse and review that exist with human-driven systems. There is no nuance, no leeway, and no way for you to reason your case with a thinking human on the other side of the decision. The algorithms & systems are also almost always completely opaque in their workings, with neither the person on the receiving end nor the company's staff having any insight into why they made decisions or what data was used. Using algorithms for life-affecting decisions like this would not be nearly as bad if you had a reasonable ability to appeal and have the decision be taken as final. It doesn't even have to be AI, or an algorithm. The British Post Office Horizon scandal is an example of lives ruined by an assumption that accounting software could never be wrong.
- pmelendez 5y ago
  >No, the implication is that we believe that these algorithms are non-faulty I think that falls under OC's argument and it seems eventually solvable. Still, what you are pointing is a human bias. Humans have been taking similar unfair decisions without possibility for recourse or review since forever, so it would be interesting to have a review mechanism in general.
  - _djo_ 5y ago

WalterBright 5y ago

People have historically complained a lot about firings not being based on an objective formula. Now the complaint is an objective formula is being used. > WW2 prisoner camps For starters, those camps would shoot anyone who tried to leave. Not the same thing at all.

polskibus 5y ago
I'd argue that if a process does not have room for you to explain yourself, and ensure that ALL data is taken into consideration by the other side then such process is authoritarian and not objective. An algorithm only looks at data it was programmed to look at, which is usually too narrow to be able to be without faults in the real world. There are good reasons why judicial systems have higher instances in them to which you can appeal to if you don't agree with lower instance.
- Cederfjard 5y ago
  >An algorithm only looks at data it was programmed to look at Programmed, or even worse trained, which means there’s no general intelligence around that really understands why it does what it does.
apexalpha 5y ago
I think the point is that to the AI, an employee is just a number. Interchangeable at any moment, with no consideration for the human person and how it affects them.
- syshum 5y ago
  So if you have 2 Programmers, One is Single has FIRE plan to early retirement, and expense to income ratio of 25%.. Another programmer has 4 kids, lives pay check to paycheck, and has a wife with a medical condition... The dept has to be downsized by 1 programmer, both programmers have the same income, the single programmer is slightly more productive.. Should the single programmer should be fired over the other because of there personal life situation?
5y ago

skrebbel 5y ago

> like WW2 prisoner camps FWIW I think your comment would've been more powerful without the Godwin.

intricatedetail 5y ago

Why the AI sidesteps responsibility? It's like stabbing someone with a screwdriver and saying screwdriver did it! Are regulators in the US that dumb or corrupt to allow it?

deregulateMed 5y ago

I was a bit too ambitious/hard working, and a coworker made it her mission to get rid of me. After 2 years she succeeded. I admittedly didn't care because I got a higher paying job in a better field, but I'll take AI over office politics.

declnz 5y ago
Yes - but this isn't an either/or situation...

venkat223 5y ago

For not working and being their own self they are not hired.The lower level workers were not adopting the e-commerce discipline of promptness.We require JBezos like monitoring and action.

goodpoint 5y ago

"the software said so" is 2020's way to denying something to someone while also trying to deflect blame. Not very different from "not financially viable", "your health insurance have expired", "your credit score does not meet the requirements". The decision of implementing such rules and methods and use such phrasing is entirely done by humans.