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AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers
- hkt 4y agoI suspect any attempt at this will lead to an extremely rigorous cargo-culting of agile and managing to the metrics. It is a silly idea.
- goodpoint 4y agoI wish!!
- KingOfCoders 4y agoThe article is about retail.
- chatterhead 4y agoAre you suggesting I change the title to be more specific to the type of hourly worker?
- yazzku 4y agoI think it would be more interesting if you elaborate on what specific middle-management tasks you think will be automated. You only touch on that very briefly. If the Roomba gets stuck nobody cares; if a bad decision is made that costs the company serious whompa$, somebody needs to be held accountable.
- chatterhead 4y agoThank you! Excellent feedback, much appreciated.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoYes. I coach CTOs and what they often miss is middle management. And I wondered how these tasks why CTOs need middle management could be replaced by AI - and I couldn't square those ideas.
- throwawaysleep 4y agoI’m surprised middle management still has much of a role with low skill jobs. Feed people instructions via app and fire them if they fail. Curious it me that retail hasn’t been appified like delivery or warehouse work.
- subradios 4y agoIt has, but the salary isn't high enough to fire underperformers, because you get what you get at 10 dollars an hour. It's the reverse of the tech situation you're likely used to - where employers gatekeep as hard as they can and are always desperate. In retail etc there's no gatekeeping but there's also no quality guarantee
- eru 4y agoFeeding people instructions is actually hard. On the low end of the job market, being able to follow instructions, especially written instructions, is a skill that not everyone has. I suspect it's more economical to have a human supervisor instead of narrowing your applicant pool to people who can follow written instructions. (Replacing written instructions with video instructions etc doesn't make things much easier.) Similarly, common sense judgement is also a skill. It's easier to have a human supervisor embody some of that judgement, then to find a way to distill it all down into formal rules. In the context of your idea, that also means figuring out who is actually failing and needs to be fired. That all being said: for decades or even centuries the economy has already been moving in the direction you are suggesting. You don't need an app for that: just write down the rules on a piece of paper or even a clay tablet.
- goalieca 4y agoDon’t worry software engineering managers, we all know it’s opposite for us! If jira were to get AI, we would have so much more to manage!
- throwawaysleep 4y agoAt least everywhere I have worked, eng managers code. It is the Scrum Masters who would be out of a job. Although if businesses cared about productivity, they wouldn’t hire meeting managers to talk ad nauseam.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoProbably would be at least a few SE managers eliminated simply by Jira being more responsive. Not that it would replace all of them but if you currently have five, you might be able to get away with having those same projects spread over four with a similar level of effectiveness if the primary tool wasn't so clunky and time consuming.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- akomtu 4y agoThis may be true, actually. The reason middle managenent exists is because the greed-driven owners hate talking to justice-driven workers, but need them to do the work.
- bobsmooth 4y agoTh only use managers bring is that its easier to explain timesheet discrepancies to them vs HR/a computer.
- ok_dad 4y agoReminds me of the story Manna: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
- jacobkg 4y agoThanks for the suggestion. Fantastic story!
- fekunde 4y agoI was looking for this comment. It is one of my favorite takes on how a simple program evolves to become the all controlling entity.
- nullc 4y agoCame here to make your comment. I think though that in the time since manna was written the ratio of machine performance on hands on and creative tasks vs management tasks has radically equalized.
- mirekrusin 4y agoMiddle management exists to put physical human between developer and management, therefore it falls under "to be replaced by robot" category. /s
- jb_gericke 4y agoThe Shannon number doesn't exist for a middle management role, which could consist of so many variations from organization to organization. I don't disagree that AI assisted decision making is a thing that's happening, but I think the author is naively understating just how far away we are from 1:1 human to AI replacement.
- chromanoid 4y agoI wonder how good middle managers can be in retail. I would guess good staff can always turn around a crisis. And this is why I think AI will either replace all of us or just change the way we work. Software will and does kill jobs, but only those that are easy to move around anyway. Take generated art for an example: If a simple prompt that you can send to a contractor is enough to satisfy your needs there is a good chance that you are already or will be able to replace artists with AI, but as soon as you want something more, AI alone will not be able to help you. After all an AI will not be able to thrive in an organic human environment, at least for the forseeable future. The moment the latter is possible, it is a matter of time that AI gives all of us the option to slack off forever.
- skilled 4y agoThis article is assuming the title because AI is good at chess? Okay then...
- quirkot 4y agoI think this article fundamentally misunderstands the core function of middle management. You can boil it down to 2 key tasks (on the front lines of a very large organization). a) Interpreting: either top->down by explaining and enforcing corporate policy on hourly workers or bottom->up by ensuring workers enter data to be reported on correctly b) "Encouraging": an employee calls in sick, again. Neither firing them or giving them the day off every time are desirable. The managers role is to "encourage" the performance and attendance (in one way or another) Neither of these are low hanging fruit for automation or even middle hanging fruit for automation. edit: I would also add that the comment "Union formation across the retail landscape will force corporations to reduce management head count" is backwards. From a management perspective, if labor gets rowdy you need more overseers to keep them in line. More union activity = more management headcount
- Gigachad 4y agoIn some ways tech can do better. It can constantly monitor many more details than a human can. It doesn’t give you a disapproving look when you take too many sick days but it does calculate a score showing over the month you got less done than your coworkers.
- phantomathkg 4y agoAnd if that worker is genuinely sick for whatever reason, can AI beat human in showing empathy?
- quirkot 4y agoIt reads like you are describing reporting. How many frowny faces were sent out at Store 123 last month for attendance? But the reason you need lower/middle mgmt is that the real question is "so what do we do to stop having these frowny faces?"
- Gigachad 4y agoWhat the system does is the rostering system preferences the workers with the highest scores when assigning shifts. And I suppose makes this number viewable to the workers so they can see why they have to optimise.
- impalallama 4y agoOddly optimistic article despite the title, but lol no. middle-management is like analogous for bureaucratic bloat and politicking. It’s been a punch line for decades that middle managers suck and don’t actually do much. This like saying AI will finally eliminate paperwork, dmv lines, or pointless meetings. The Inefficiencies are built in and Hierarchical structures of a traditional company Necessitate someone between the peons on the executives. AI isn’t going to somehow alter that. Besides I want someone to be between me and my boss. An intermediary between me and the guy who can fire me at any moment.
- 01100011 4y ago"AI" is making some amazing advances these days. It's fueling quite a bit of optimism and outright delusion. It's getting a bit tiring to read through all the hype.
- Gigachad 4y agoTbh some of the things that seemed obvious are taking longer than expected while wild advances on seemingly difficult fields pop up out of nowhere. At the start of the year I would have told you by now we would have progressed on automated pizza delivery but not be able to generate convincing art.
- hinkley 4y agoDoes anyone have a good summary or book recommendation about non bullshit progress in the field?
- Barrin92 4y agoAI is going to replace neither and it's definitely not going to replace human-facing management work anytime soon. Reminder that we're decades and over a hundred billion into self-driving cars and they're a marginal phenomenon. If we'd listened to Andrew Ng we should have stopped training radiologists years ago. (haven't seen a lot of unemployed radiologists recently), and so on. AI managers and lawyers replacing middle management is a good premise for a sci-fi story but not much else. Not to mention that the article focuses on retail. As long as Google uses middle managers I'm fairly certain ALDI will. They still use fax in Japan. If you want to talk about the pace of tech change in ordinary large business I'd take that as a reference point
- intellectronica 4y agoI don't think the author understands what middle management does.
- throwaway742 4y agoI'm not sure that anyone does.
- intellectronica 4y ago:D
- bigbacaloa 4y agoBut someone has to decide what metrics AI will use, how many cousins of upper management can be hired, that sort of thing, and that's where middle management is irreplaceable.
- throwaway742 4y agoinshallah
- JamesBarney 4y agoThat's a lot of wild claims and very little evidence or even analysis.
- chaostheory 4y agoMaybe if he could back up his assumption with facts and data, people wouldn’t be dismissing it so quickly, but he’s offering nothing in terms of a good argument Middle managers also tend not to form unions unlike low skilled and low educated frontline workers. Also making good, fuzzy decisions is harder for machines vs doing simple, low skill, repetitive tasks
- shock-value 4y agoThis is a poorly reasoned or at least a poorly articulated essay. AI to this point is built to optimize some objective function. What is that function with respect to middle management? Some sort of mathematical expression would be interesting but even a plain-English expression would certainly be helpful. And what exactly are the inputs and output? I guess the inputs could be a roster of employees along with some performance metrics, and output is a list of who is kept and who is fired (?). That’s the best I can come up with, but I still think it’s an absurd and impractical eventuality. The article doesn’t even make an attempt to explain. This isn’t some sort of nitpick; AI to this point has not in any way encroached upon personnel management to my knowledge and a prediction in that direction ought to elucidate exactly how that could be expected to work. Managing workers involves empathy and understanding human emotions generally and I’ve seen no indication that AI has made advances into this space recently despite its rapid progress elsewhere.
- mjburgess 4y agoThis is an interesting critique of modern AI: almost no problems have closed-form mathematical descriptions. The "Ng Reply" would be that the objective fn can be approximated by a finite composition of simpler functions, tuned by data (ie., relu.relu.relu...) However if you think about it for a second, that's clearly absurd in almost all cases. We know that we cannot even in principle formulate a closed form expression for (here, eg., people management) -- the idea that there exists some meaningful approximation feels provably silly.
- wnkrshm 4y agoIf someone can design a company structure where you decouple your employees from their superiors entirely, it'll be inhuman but I bet there will be people who will try. The AI hype is just so strong.
- trashtester 4y ago> What is that function with respect to middle management? It's probably easier to create such a function for the CEO and board. For instance some risk weighted present day value of future net earnings, possibly combined with short- medium term stock market value to please stock owners that have a shorter-than-infinite horizon for their ownership. Once that is decided, mid level manager objectives reduces to whatever optimizes the CEO objectives.
- snowwrestler 4y agoWhat does chess have in common with retail middle management? As someone who has managed a retail store and played chess, I can confidently answer: nothing. Remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy? And then IBM saturated the airwaves with ads about how Watson was going to revolutionize industries like energy and health care? Notice how we don’t see those ads anymore? It’s because winning Jeopardy has nothing to do with providing health care and energy. Like chess, it’s an artificially constrained game with a clearly defined goal. Whereas business is unconstrained and nobody knows what will succeed over time. The hardest thing about management is managing people, who are generally self-centered, opinionated, and wishing they were doing something else. How, specifically, will AI be better at that than humans? AI cannot even reliably autocorrect this comment as I’m typing it. How is it going to convince Jack to switch his shift and come in to cover open on Sunday because Jill’s sister was in a car accident and Jill is watching her niece? How’s AI going to do that better than a fellow human?
- scifibestfi 4y agoHello Human, If you're not in today, don't bother coming in tomorrow. Cheers, -AI
- imgabe 4y agowoohoo, 4 day weekend!
- otabdeveloper4 4y agok. - Human worker.
- LesZedCB 4y agoreminds me of that joke Zizek likes to make about dating. two lovers meet up at ones house for Netflix and chill, she takes out her vibrator and he takes his fleshlight. they put them together to let them do what sexual machines do, so now their obligation is fulfilled and they can enjoy conversation instead.
- rippercushions 4y agoI work at a large company that invested countless dev hours in building an automated shift scheduling system, then gave up, bought a scheduling system from a vendor, and has now spent several years tweaking that system to match their requirements. Guess what? It works OK when everything is fine, but if anything even mildly out of the ordinary happens and more than a few people are unavailable for any reason (year-end holidays, travel, conferences, etc), boom, it's back to a manager manually putting together the schedule again. And this is the best case scenario with motivated, largely self-managing employees who can be trusted to, say, figure out shift swaps if something comes up at short notice. Good luck automating scheduling at McDonalds, and remember this is only a tiny part of what a manager has to deal with every day.
- naijaboiler 4y agoI double dare AI to make that teenager working at McDonalds a more dependable worker.
- DrJid 4y agoPlot twist: This article itself was written by AI.
- wefarrell 4y agoThis reminds me of an argument I got into at a bar with someone who claimed robots would inevitably replace bartenders. I took the view that bartenders would be the last occupation to be replaced by robots because if the goal was to minimize the cost to consume alcohol people wouldn't be coming to bars in the first place. There's a misconception that jobs with higher pay and more prestige will be the last to be replaced by robots. In many cases I think the opposite is true and in this case I think upper management will be replaced by robots before middle management.
- TuringNYC 4y ago>> I think upper management will be replaced by robots before middle management. You are already correct. In a sense, the highest level of management is the shareholder/owner. Capital allocation is one of the most highly automated tasks currently. We see this with SAA (Strategic Asset Allocation) programmes being run across all major capital managers and owners.
- DonHopkins 4y agoAnd as robots replaced more jobs, more people would be going to bars.
- ciceryadam 4y agoHigher unemployment wouldn't necessarily mean fuller bars. Probably more at home drinking.
- rippercushions 4y agoThis article doesn't even understand what middle managers do. The functions listed like "scheduling, negotiating, training" are for line managers, who are directly responsible for supervising the line workers actually doing the work. Middle management is the next layer up the food chain: the managers of managers, responsible for executing strategy coming from up high, but lacking executive power to actually change that strategy.
- shaburn 4y agoIn this episode of class warfare turns Nuclear...
- andrewstuart 4y agoThis is silly. AI is truly amazing, but don't be fooled by the incredibly graphical artworks it is delivering. All that stuff is weird, dreamlike images that make no sense. When you look at a really great AI image, it is the one cherry picked after discarding 1,000 nonsensical garbage images. And chess has nothing to do with AI unless it's an AI learning how to play chess. All in all there's nothing even close to human behavior anywhere in the AI landscape, just things that kinda almost look like human behavior if you squint enough.
- iterm2 4y agoAll I read in the post is a statement. Curious though - Will AI turn humans in to managers who act like AI bots? Ultimate AI robots might be the humans acting and working like AI robots.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thejackgoode 4y agoLet’s go ahead and see an AI trained on Bill Lumbergh character, yeah, right.
- HL33tibCe7 4y ago
- spaceman_2020 4y agoNot going to happen. In 5 years, the current AI hype will be the same as the state of 3D Printing, IoT, AR/VR. There is a fundamental disconnect between tech bros’ dreams and reality. These dreams have an outsized expectation of the tech-literacy of the average person. They also make the mistake of completely assuming that human decisions are driven by logic, not emotion.
- 52-6F-62 4y agoFurther, that somehow the reality is inferior to their other imagined, autocratic world.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gwm83 4y agoSome real anxiety in the comments here. I personally think this is a positive situation - one which could have been avoided if real human managers had a hint of empathy, humility, and understanding of their job : to be human conduits to a mechanical system. I have had 3 or 4 great real human managers in my career. But that also includes at least a dozen horrible troll-drones. They deserve it. Give me nothing, get nothing. Even the real human ones were just buffering whatever they could before I quit.
- lettergram 4y agoMiddle managements primary job is making an employee feel supported, encouraged and empowered. Guarantee an AI will be able to do none of that lol. My first objective as middle management was always to bond on a personal level to some degree. I’d do this on a weekly basis to build trust: - Talk about personal, but work appropriate topics — gardening, pets, sports, what have you. - Discuss projects and objectives. Discuss concerns, things that went well, any support needed, etc - discuss professional development (we’d outline these ahead of time). What progress is being made, how to go about achieving objectives, etc. often this was outside of work. - discuss / mediate any interpersonal conflicts on the team The most important aspect of my job as middle management was always the bonding. I doubt an AI can relate to gardening or getting a beer at a happy hour watching the local college football. Without that trust a team wouldn’t follow the AI.
- heavyset_go 4y agoIt's like we've learned nothing from the techno-optimist claim that work automation will give workers more free time to pursue their own desires. In theory, it might be able to at some point. However, in reality, the claim ignores the power structures that the automation/AI/tech doesn't dissolve, but only reinforces. Some people want to lord over other people, AI isn't going to make that go away without changing the power structures that let it happen.
- b800h 4y agoAnd some people want and need leaders. It's not a matter of "letting it happen", it's a ore function of humanity. And in the absence of formal hierarchy you get informal hierarchy which is much worse and more tyrannical.
- heavyset_go 4y agoI said nothing about needing or not needing leaders. Most leaders in someone's life did not get the roles democratically. Existing power structures are why those in charge are not chosen in a democratic manner, and AI won't replace management in its current form for similar reasons.
- goodpoint 4y agoCriticizing technooptimism on HN is a lost cause unfortunately.
- aaron695 4y ago
- roschdal 4y agoThis is such wonderful news.
- andrewjl 4y agoThis isn't a new idea, see Project Cybersyn[1]. A few books / works by Stafford Beer, who architected much of that project, that I recommend reading. - Brain Of The Firm - Designing Freedom, 1973 Massey Lectures[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn [2] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-designing-freedom-1.2946819 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-...
- hinkley 4y agoTo what extent has software already reduced management overhead?
- daniel_iversen 4y agoI'm definitely an AI maximalist and worried about mass unemployment one day, but I think this article isn't right; it's too shallow and has some assumptions that aren't right. Chess isn't comparable to management because chess is ultimately based on simple rules. And I think we're already seeing automation and robots replacing hourly workers in a lot of interesting scenarios incl. self-checkouts and app-based automated checkouts in stores, robots that delivers your food in Asian restaurants etc. What I do think though is that wasteful administrative management (and non-management) work is slowly getting less (caveat: I work at Asana and it's our mission to make work coordination, tracking and reporting easier. Same with rostering tools like Deputy etc.) and so we're certainly minimising the "middle manager overhead" but to say that it's being replaced is a long stretch.
- jdkee 4y agoChess is complicated. Running a business is complex.
- mjburgess 4y agoCells of a chess game are like cells of the body. Everything follows rules. /s It's nice to see, here, this kinda reply hit peak silliness. "Isn't AI just like... thing we do?" No. But many of the major papers, press releases, etc. want you to believe that. Often, they want to believe that. But none have bothered to seriously find out what we do.
- monkeydust 4y agoI think the broad consensus was AI would replace Manual, Knowledge and Creative workers in that order. Seems to be trending the other way. Recently seen more tele-operational solutions in robotics space to replace or compliment manual labour. There seems to be something to this where full automation is not feasible or where it fails and needs recovery.
- rickdeckard 4y agoMaybe we are also seeing a revision for the definition of "creative" work. Executing a task like "I want a pic of a doplhin jumping out of the sunset with a cereal box, winking at the camera" is maybe not going to be in the same bracket of other creative work in the future...
- pessimizer 4y ago> Seems to be trending the other way. Their order never made any sense anyway. Manual laborers are doing the most complicated, varied, movements optimized over time. Every new movement for a robot requires more mechanical creativity and introduces more fragility. Knowledge and creative workers click on things and type stuff. Manual workers are expected to maintain themselves, generally don't get any health insurance, and if they get damaged are expected to repair themselves or be replaced. Complicated machines break down and require specialized maintenance and repair from highly skilled professionals. You can also pay knowledge and creative workers trash, but their output is very slow compared to the machines that will replace them. Manual workers can be abused and ignored, and if they roll their eyes about it, fired without cause. If you have a robot, that is now the center of your business, and if the robot isn't happy, no one is happy. Knowledge and creative workers are more likely to kick up a stink when abused. Manual workers and robots complement each other, raising productivity. As knowledge workers and creatives start working with ML tools instead of Creative Suite and MS Office, it will gradually become harder and harder to justify why the robots need the artist's help; you can be a good photographer by taking a good photograph, or you can be a good photographer by traveling to interesting places, taking 1000 photographs, and choosing the one you like best. ML gives us the analog of the latter case for free. It really comes down to the fact that maintaining complicated machinery (to replace a manual worker) is a lot more expensive than maintaining a bunch of commodity servers (to replace a knowledge worker.)
- hinkley 4y ago> I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization.
- gwm83 4y agohello as a captain of bullshit I am observing this.
- alvis 4y agoThe funny things is we all know the content is kinda nonsense, & yet our reaction pushed this thread to the top of HN in just 2H!
- DeathArrow 4y agoI got a business idea: create AI managers and rent them to corporations for 9 hours / day for 50% the rate of a human manager.
- luxuryballs 4y agoI don’t think the Roomba is a good example here, it has a basic brain for a reason and it’s not because of a lack of available technology, it’s because most people don’t want to pay $7000 for one.
- LatteLazy 4y agoAnd both will be powered by fusion and we'll all commute in self driving cars.
- figital 4y agochess jokes. grow arugula.
- rouxz 4y agojust another tale from vienna woods, lmao
- jhoechtl 4y agoThe current definition of AI (whose "output" actually IS deterministic) does more harm than benefit as it evokes expectations which can't be met. Automated text translation in real time? Certainly impressive but nowhere intelligent in the human sense of intelligence or smartness. I am confident that no "AI" will ever replace humans in any meaningful way unless we come up with an entirely new computing principle. Maybe quantum computers will bring us there, I honestly don't know.
- rouxz 4y agoThis article seems to be written by AI for sure.
- underwater 4y agoEvery manager I have ever worked with has struggled to quantify the performance of their employees, or to define the inputs that affect employee performance. Good luck building an AI that can manage without knowing either of those two things.
- kumarvvr 4y agoYeah no. Middle management is the grease that makes the cogs and gears move. They pull off a million of small targeted custom actions every day. They are not going to be replaced by AI.
- gonzo41 4y agoI hope this new boss is called "Decision Matrix" with the motto "Harsh and unrelenting". That'll capture the linear algebra roots and the sterile nature of the thinking. Whilst middle managment is often rightly panned as ineffective, they obviously do bring some sort of value, or at least enable it. They may just need to keep a few of the meat puppets around to act as proxies for the AI so people don't know they are starting to live in westworld.
- bergenty 4y agoAs long as there are people working, you will need people managers. It’s a job as old as civilization.
- _nalply 4y agoLast year I tendered a logo redesign to freelancers on a specialized website. The experience was not pleasant. After all they are humans. They had diverging interests. Two designers did something I liked and I would have liked to combine their work, but they didn't cooperate. I had to compromise. One of the designers got very angry at me because of that compromise. The other one didn't give me all the files I requested and messed up half of the files. Of course it is also my fault. After all, I am human, too. Stable diffusion is not quite right, either. It wouldn't have worked. However I was struck how easy it is to just give "orders". I didn't need to cushion my demands to make them socially acceptable. I didn't need to be afraid to annoy someone. I just could refine and refine and refine. A lot of pressure just went poof. I imagine upper management is feeling the same about middle management. The AI spark is already here now. Some people will try to replace middle management with AI or are already trying. Of course they will fail spectacularly. Several times. But there will be a time where someone gets it and then it will spread like wildfire through the corporate world. I imagine it will be something like a connection of GPT-n (where n >= 3) to ERP data. Upper management will tell the AI to determine detail plans for hourly workers and fill the ERP with orders for them. Hourly workers get a tablet to tick off tasks. The AI will check whether the plan is executed and escalate if something goes wrong they can't fix themselves.
- arrosenberg 4y agoThat only works in scenarios where labor is fungible, like logo design. Try telling a key employee all that stuff, you'll get told you can do it yourself.
- _nalply 4y agoOf course. Perhaps it is wrong to talk about middle management being replaced by AI. It seems that AI as of now is not very inventive. It is a clever mash-up of things that were already done by humans. But most employees just do that. They learn from others in school, college or on the job how to do things in their profession and then employ what they have learned. If they use a computer to execute then actually nothing stops them from being replaced by the computer itself.
- camillomiller 4y agoIf this is correct, and I think it is, then we should worry about the spiral of inequality that this will generate. I don’t think that the money saved from not having middle managers would trickle down as much as up.
- ricardobayes 4y agoWhen I was a project manager I wrote a script that basically replaced 50% of my job. Following up with late tickets, asking for daily updates for standup etc.
- jakuboboza 4y agoMiddle managment is mainly around being spreadsheet warrior so i believe this is fairly good assesment.
- obliquely 4y agoIt's not a great article, but the main line of objection in comments here seems to be "This won't happen, because AI won't do the job well and certainly not better than humans." Sadly, we already know that that's not a reason for things not happening. For example, robot staffed called centres are worse in almost every way than human staffed ones. And yet they are widely deployed in certain use cases, e.g. utility companies. And, more broadly, even when humans are involved in some chain of interaction between person and organisation, they sometimes have limited options because the computerised system imposed on them is not to designed to empower them to make on-the-hoof discretionary decisions. Organisations chose to use automated systems of various kinds, because they think it saves money and because the reduction in service is not so appalling that that they lose customers. Or, of course, because they are an essential service, and people need to use them anyway. We might think that competition would mean that organisations who didn't do this would do better, but often that's not how it actually works. Having an appalling system for escalating complaints is terrible for the relatively small number of people who need to make complaints. But organisations are often not optimising for good handling of edge cases even if, in some better world, we would like them to be. (Or, indeed, never mind what we would like, organisations might not optimise for edges cases even if it might be rational for them to in the sense that it might actually save them money - edges cases can be expensive - or win them reputation - handling edges cases well is good "marketing" etc.)
- tuatoru 4y agoCall centers are a special case. Pure cost, and actually helping customers often results in either extra cost (returns and replacements) or loss of revenue (credits, cancellations). Do you have ten other examples (besides payroll, billing, and computer and communication service delivery)?
- jakey_bakey 4y agoThis seems completely far-fetched and it gives the impression that the author has no idea what middle management entails. Middle managers are a business' communication infrastructure and the idea that those mostly soft skills can be done by a computer is laughable.
- quonn 4y agoProbably true for now. But „what a computer can do“ is not a convincing reason. I have been very surprised by that lately and will perhaps be surprised again.
- MisterBastahrd 4y agoPeople don't need AI managers. We need AI personal assistants to handle mundane shit while we do things that solve problems. Most people are reasonably capable of managing themselves once given initial direction.
- Hackbraten 4y agoGood luck trying to convince your AI-powered manager to give you the day off so you can say goodbye to your dying child or parent.
- seu 4y ago> Artificial Intelligence is now capable of beating the best humans at chess 100% of the time no questions asked. The Roomba in the corner of my room still gets stuck on things and runs out of power. This is a ridiculous comparison. Chess is infinitely less complex than the most simple of living rooms. Real world tasks are much more complex than something contained inside a limited, finite universe like that of chess.
- langsoul-com 4y agoNeed some examples on how such an AI would work. Is there any existing AI that does that and what were the effects? Cant just slap AI on a topic and call it a day...
- JED3 4y agoThis is maybe more of a semantic disagreement, but I would expect the frontline manager, not middle management, to be the first in management to shrink in population on account of AI. If software and AI is to be made more responsible for managing the hourly worker, then naturally your frontline manager should be capable of managing more humans at once, thereby reducing the company's need for frontline managers. As a result, managers can be made responsible for more people at once, teams can be larger, and fewer frontline managers being needed. However, claiming that management will be affected "before" the hourly employee is an invalid prediction in today's age. The hourly employee has already been disproportionately affected by AI, some even made obsolete by robots or automation. Retail (especially brick & mortar) has already seen many of those jobs be replaced by much less sophisticated advancements (ecommerce, d2c, etc), arguing to the contrary would be impossible to back up at this point.
- xbmcuser 4y agoUnlikely 1 middle management cost lets say $20k plus insurance for 1 person where as 20 hourly worker's cost $10k x 20 = $200k. Business will always try to go for decreasing the bigger expense. Another thing most people don't seem to get small business are 70-80% of the worlds economy so the middle management does not exist or is the boss family or friend.
- cik 4y agoI find it interesting that the conversation herein is about the viability, as opposed to whether or not this is a desired outcome. Personally, I welcome every outcome where machines replace the roles people undertake (myself included). A fascinating and painful set of possibilities emerge. People, indeed societies will need to re-examine their definitions of "work", "purpose", "success" and all sorts of other things. Perhaps we'll step forward to a post-humanist/adamist economy. Perhaps we'll enter a randist/gattacist society. Maybe a commerce-free world is created - or maybe time becomes a fixed currency? Maybe all, or none of the above are true. But ultimately, for the progression of our societies, I'd love to see these conversations.
- piokoch 4y agoNo, it will not. Maybe it will replace higher management some day. Long time ago Napoleon noticed that strength of an army depends on its corporals. The same with companies, tech leads, middle management makes a true difference - you might have the best strategy but without using proper tactics it will never succeed. And tactics, all those day to day activities, are managed by those people in the middle of management ladder.
- tuatoru 4y agoAI is great at all jobs except those that people actually do. Robots are the same, except more so.
- Blackstone4 4y agoI am middle management....a big part of my job is understanding my juniors needs and enabling them to do their jumps by promoting their cause with the leadership. Secondly I lead the hiring and ongoing training of staff...not sure how AI is going to do all this...
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoAnother of these articles. Middle management is mostly about managing people, not taking decisions. The decisions MMs can make are extremely limited. They are hired so that the top management doesn't have to deal with all these pesky employees.
- noduerme 4y agoJust speaking as a student of Arendt, the most dangerous thing in the world is a rich country with suddenly unemployed middle managers. There's a straight up reason we keep those sociopaths busy.
- pipo234 4y agoNo worries - if our beloved middle management is eliminated we'll just invent new https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
- PakG1 4y agoIt's already happening. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-robots-are-coming-is-your-firm-ready/ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-robots-are-c... https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3812 https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2020.381... "As a new general-purpose technology, robots have the potential to radically transform employment and organizations. In contrast to prior studies that predict dramatic employment declines, we find that investments in robotics are associated with increases in total firm employment but decreases in the total number of managers. Similarly, we find that robots are associated with an increase in the span of control for supervisors remaining within the organization."
- LeonM 4y agoI worked for a large grocery store chain between 2004 and 2010, there the AI had already taken over. Though we didn't call it an AI, just 'the system'. The system was able to procure goods with stunning accuracy. Sometimes it even surprised us. For example: we'd receive a much higher number of BBQ meat than typical, only to realise it was going to be amazing weather the coming days. The system was also making schedules for the re-stocking team with the same accuracy. It knew what it ordered, the exact time the truck was due to arrive, at which time the personnel was available (not at school, for example), etc. The system told us when to show up, and when we had to be finished. The system was even able to pinpoint cashiers that were stealing money from the register, by correlating cash count of the individual registers to the schedule (which the AI also created). It would then 'isolate' the suspected employee to a single register and order a cash count (which was done by hand) at the end of the day. Basically the only reason why there still was a manager was for responsibility and babysitting (most employees were teens that did dumb stuff). And the occasional Karen who wanted to talk to a manager. I remember being being thoroughly impressed with the efficiency of the software back then. In some ways it must have influenced my career path (I now work in automating businesses). I left in 2010, I can only imagine how much more advanced this system has become since.
- rocqua 4y agoThat sounds like truly valuable ERP, and largely devoid of AI.
- ketzo 4y agoWhy devoid of AI? Not being combative here, genuinely curious Perhaps devoid of machine learning, given the year, but even that seems unlikely if the anecdote is true. If predicting and planning outcomes and with previous data is not some form of AI, what is? Agreed on the valuable ERP thing, though. There’s a reason SAP is as expensive as it is.
- cachvico 4y ago> If predicting and planning outcomes and with previous data is not some form of AI, what is? Algorithmic forecasting. If you squint really hard, the entirety of computer science falls under "AI". But practically speaking, today AI refers to ML. It's quite possible a savvy programmer integrated the weather forecast to the ERP, with specific products tagged as relevant to a sunny (or wet) outlook. That's not AI, that's just an algo. It's also possible there was ML at play, but that's not clear, and not necessarily the case.
- meldyr 4y agoThis article doesn't seem to be grounded in reality. I see self-checkouts, electronic toll collection, vending machines, automation of assembly lines, robots doing order picking in warehouses, self-driving trains in airports and many others replacing hourly workers today. However, I am not aware of any AI-system replacing a middle manager. I know it is popular to hate on middle-managers. But good middle manager culture is probably one of the best predictors of company performance. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danpontefract/2019/04/24/it-turns-out-that-middle-managers-are-the-key-to-improved-stock-market-performance/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/danpontefract/2019/04/24/it-tur...
- AndyPa32 4y agoI bought a kitchen table at Amazon. Now the recommendation engine recommends more kitchen tables and that is going on for half a year now. As long as that is the state of the art, I am not afraid that AI will replace my job, which requires some out of the box thinking.
- mclightning 4y agoI am experiencing the same across the board. I buy something, and X platform starts showing me ads about the very thing I already bought.
- dgudkov 4y agoExactly my sentiment. AI in most cases is too dumb. At best it creates an illusion of doing something useful.
- goodpoint 4y agoWrong. The recommendation engine is working correctly, and people who bought a kitchen table are more likely to buy another one compared to buying a completely unrelated item.
- rowanajmarshall 4y agoMaybe I don't know enough about recommendation systems, but surely not? If I buy a kitchen table, in my demographic (mid-20s in rented accommodation) it's because I moved into a new flat, or my existing table broke. In either case, buying a new table actually marks the start of a long period where I won't be buying any new tables, and every day from then onwards I'm slightly more likely to buy a table.
- marcosdumay 4y agoAs far as I know, buying a kitchen table is so rare that the unlikely possibility that you return it, it breaks, or you are a "serial mover" that rents homes for small times can be enough to make the odds of somebody that just brought a table buying another higher than some random person. Unless you have some aggregated market data, you don't know either. Up to very recently, nobody knew if the likelihood increased or not. Nowadays a few people are able to discover it, but it doesn't look like they bothered to.
- lm28469 4y ago> Ai will replace _insert job_ So the same thing as since the 60s when politicians and technocrats promised automation would allow a 3 days / 15 hours workweek but instead of doing that it pushed people in shittier and shittier jobs, with longer hours, and increased the retirement age ? Can't wait for that !
- alg0rith 4y agoA COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION - IBM
- JacobiX 4y agoThe author talks about AI management solutions that will reduce management head count as if such solutions are available and ready to use. But I'm not aware that such solutions are available yet.
- LeanderK 4y agoI think this post is simplistic. Chess does not have anything to do with what most middle-managers do and I don't see AI manage humans with more depth, it has to become sentient first essentially. I think for AI to replace most middle managers it has to get really smart, understand problems instantly and assess their consequences. This is something we can't do and I think we will rather see better robots first since their environment is more constrained. But for "humans as resources" we are already seeing this. If the task is repetitive, clearly defined then we have something like gig-economy where some middle managers are absent. Nobody dispatches uber-drivers, it's all automated.
- hrbf 4y agoIt’s for this reason alone that bureaucracy can not be reduced or its processes streamlined in the foreseeable future. It doesn’t even need AI, just digital services. The bureaucrat will fight tooth and nail for the status quo to remain in place and prevent technical updates whenever possible. More efficiency means facing the pointlessness of one’s job. Exhibit A: Germany.
- heikkilevanto 4y agoI have worked under some scrum masters that could easily be replaced by AI. Or by a small script.
- phonebucket 4y agoIt's not machine learning that's required to make computers better than humans at chess. Non machine-learning chess engines engines based on alpha-beta pruning and expertly-crafted evaluation functions have been stronger than all human chess players for a long time now. Given this blog post, one might ask whether replacing middle management with alpha-beta pruning and expertly-crafted evaluation functions makes sense.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoI haven't read the article yet, but here's one approach: don't replace middle management with AI, just fire all of them. Much cheaper and gives 90% of the benefit of replacing these people with computers.
- zoomablemind 4y agoI think that one of important purposes of hierarchy alongside the delegation of responsibilities is the delegation of liabilities. One can let AI handle some of the aspects of responsibilities of middle mgmt, like reports, metrics and assignments. But should things go south for whatever reason, AI won't be able to assume the liabilities and shield the upper mgmt. Besides, one can't form a clique or faction with AI. On the other hand, replacing workers with AI still has the lure of "advancement" ... to bad AI hyped more than it could deliver and in the long run turned more expensive to operate, hardly replaceable too.
- jt2190 4y agoAsk yourself: In your day job, how much “management” of your work do you do for yourself? If your answer is “I mostly manage myself”, then your manager has already vacated the role we’re talking about automating with AÍ. You will experience this new AI manager as a set of tools to help you get your work done. If your answer is “I am frequently, directly managed” then your manager will be replaced by software that is able to more quickly and accurately monitor your work, because computers can be everywhere, all at once, real-time, 24/7, and no human can beat them at this. There will still be someone “higher-up-the-chain” from you, but they won’t be interacting with you on a daily basis.
- ebiester 4y agoDevelopment is likely a bad example. Consider a grocery store. I'm related to someone who worked grocery in the 90s. There was a job called a Merchandiser that would fly to every store in a region, consult with the store to help them with their ordering, and provide guidance with product placement. Their job was nearly entirely replaceable with good algorithms and camera enforcement. It could have been replaced with a computer, a camera, and three people in the home office that functioned as a panopticon. That is how AI replaces middle management.
- jt2190 4y ago> Development is likely a bad example. Does “development” refer to something in my comment or something else? (Neither my comment nor the original post refer to “Development”.)
- borbulon 4y agoI think had the author gone with a thesis more like "AI will remove the decision-making from middle management, leaving purely the human-to-human aspect of management," it might have been a more palatable (though still arguable) essay. As it is, there's tons that managers do that AI will never really do, because those things can't be boiled down to mathematical formulae.
- ericmay 4y agoI don't think AI will replace middle management. I think what we consider "middle management" is largely just going to go away over time because it's no longer required or cost-effective. AI replacing it is a big of an oxymoron. AI would just eliminate it, not replace it.
- hussainbilal 4y agoMiddle Management is more or less resource allocation (so optimization problem maybe of the stochastic, multi-agent, multi-criteria and/or multi-objective flavour if you want it to be super complex). This article is right for the wrong reasons. AI/ML (which approximates optimization problems due to inputs not being clearly defined) is not required for the replacement of middle management (an actual optimization problem with clearly defined inputs).
- nottorp 4y ago> Artificial Intelligence is now capable of beating the best humans at chess 100% of the time no questions asked [ ... ] or a program capable of making the best possible business decision given historic and currently available data? I believe the OP has an interesting definition of business decision. Also that a management AI would be good ... at giving us faster horses.
- helen___keller 4y agoI think this is looking at things from the wrong perspective Corporations can be viewed as artificial intelligences. Some components of that corporation are human, such as the marketing professional designing an advertisement or the executive deciding to invest $40 million in IT infrastructure. Some components of that corporation are not human, such as an automated system that sends emails and tracks metrics on the performance of the marketing campaign. Rather than asking if this or that job will be automated, ask whether the total percentage of (loosely defined) 'stuff' that a corporation does will be more or less human over time? I would argue that the answer is, with decades and decades of evidence, over time corporations will do more and more with fewer humans. Jobs aren't automated, job functions are. If most "middle manager" job functions are automated, we might still see middle managers but as a smaller percentage of the overall corporation. If some retail functions are also automated, then we might see both stay in the same ratio, but the business is capable of vastly more revenue without increasing the size of the staff. Regardless, I would think it's largely accepted that in the foreseeable future, corporations will continue to do more 'stuff' with fewer humans.
- grayfaced 4y agoI see a lot of traps with this. Who manages it and maintains the AI? They have a lot of power over the company and most companies won't have skillset. What happens when there is a crisis (natural disaster, employee walkout)? What happens when there is downtime? What happens when the AI goes off the rails (fed bad data?), who can override it? What happens when the system is compromised? What are the assigned goals of the AI? Short-term profit, long-term profit, employee retention/satisfaction, public image? Those have to be assigned priority values. Those programmatic goals will likely not align with stated company goals. Will people learn how to game the system? What is the training data? If the data is biased, will the AI learn the bias? Does the AI understand legal protections? If someone makes a harassment complaint against a coworker, is that input it processes? What if someone requires medical accommodations? All that said, I support it as a tool to be used by people. I'm just against overreliance and need to be able to gracefully fallback.
- giantg2 4y ago"AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers" No it won't. In my experience, management does many things that they don't want a paper trail of. Having a system means there will be a record. No company wants that liability, and few would actually adhere strictly to their own policies.
- bioemerl 4y agoWe should really be focusing on making it easier for people to do their jobs, not replacing them. In the end they are the same thing, but it's way easier and more accomplishable to slowly improve a person's productivity than it is to remove the human brain from the system.
- bluGill 4y agoMaybe, but remember most hourly workers have been automated out of a job over the previous decades. What is left are the hard to automate jobs. My company produces more product than ever on about a tenth of the hourly workers we had in 1950. Easy management jobs will be automated away, but that will leave the hard ones.
- clavalle 4y agoAI will enhance middle management and make things easier, but people problems are complex in a way that AI is a loooooong way off from understanding. Once they figure that out, it's time for us to kickback, relax, and enjoy the ensuing utopia and/or apocalypse. AI is far more likely to replace upper management and executive levels, especially in large corporations, since those roles are a lot more 'by the numbers' and act on probabilities rather than specific, nuanced, and complex instances.
- rybosworld 4y agoThis article is bait. Rage-bait if you are middle management. Screw-your-manager-bait if you hate your boss.
- keepuncovering 4y agoI don't agree 100% with that but there's some truth in it. we will get more Github co-pilot like products to do lot of data organization summarization and predictive work. And then humans will do the nuanced decision making and narration. so yes less # of people needed but you people STILL needed. People will be expected to wear lot of hats. "Oh I am Operations Manager" No sir you are not, you are also expected to drive product development and your people development. No bullshit departments like Product or HR Management would exist within a decade. People are going to be judged purely on raw critical thinking skills. Not the COlleGe they went to ExPErienCe they have
- aaroninsf 4y agoI think the one-sentence version of this thesis is much more interesting and true than the specific build out: "AI" will very obviously continue to make inroads into traditional human knowledge-work and adjacent domains, automating roles and (for some metrics) outperforming humans. The lemmas are playing out in too many domains to track any longer already: there will be blowback largely defined by intentional and unintentional confusion and misplaced identification of root problems; and by chaos where historic structures (legal ethical and otherwise) which were reasonable when the only agents exhibiting agency were human, now have to contend with a spectrum of collaborative entities mixing individuals, communities, and "AI" of all kinds. "Middle management" is a misnomer, but the premise is reasonable, that which can be quantified will be optimized. As noted ITT what and how quantification occurs and whether that tracks "reality" (or traditional fictions at least) remains to be seen. My own take on that is that what we will mostly see is evolutionary pressure weeding out unviable failures, accommodating for a while at least midling failures, and a slow quiet creep towards deeper and more pervasively "correct" solutions, all trending inexorably towards even less and more existential challenges at both the philosophical and societal level, and the basic one defined by the paperclip peril of the Alignment Problem. I am unsurprised that certain domains (like effective definition of and execution of a business plan through an organization made of non-fungible humans) will prove exceedingly hard to fully capture. But I am now regularly surprised by ice-shelf-break level dramatic gains in domains that seemed until recently equally unassailable. The ingenue in this domain for me is Whisper. It's just... solved that problem for good, it seems.
- jokethrowaway 4y agoThis is science fiction. Companies are too stupid to get rid of middle managers (as a useless middle manager myself). There is literally a generation of business leaders growing up believing crap they see on Linkedin whose only purpose is to make useless people feel needed. Middle managers are here to stay for quite some time - at least until we have the same companies. And they have a lot of money to keep living the way they're living. I think we can have companies without middle managers, but it will feel like working in 100 different startups instead of working in a single company. I assume AI managers could automate DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) and we might transition to a world where companies are basically all just DAOs
- alibeer 4y agoTo claim this, you must have no clue about what middle management is. It might not look like it, but it's the most critical layer that creates a healthy culture within a company.
- monsterofcookie 4y agoLOL