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This 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 resp

This 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 ago
This 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 ago
If 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.

mjburgess 4y ago

This 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 ago

If 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.