It's not a perfect remedy, but you have to loop in the people affected by decisions as part of the decision making structure. That is, for example, customers and workers have to be part of the management structure.
This doesn't happen because it would reduce the power of top decision makers and potentially impact profits. e.g. a customer might ask for a chronologically ordered timeline on Facebook, but that would harsh engagement metrics, revenue, etc. If stuff like this did happen more often though, you'd get products and services that more often achieve their stated aims.
I understand what you're saying. When I was working as a Product Manager, I had to try really hard to do things for the customer (after user testing etc.)
Normally the response from management was "but will that increase our profits?", to which my answer was "eventually, yes"
Even if you take engineering you see that adding more links on a chain increases latency and demands more auxiliary circuitry. But at least in engineering you can design each part to do what you want it to do close to perfection. And it will scale better because you can build everything to spec and bin, which is why we automate a lot of tasks. With humans that can't happen. Human "binning" is a constantly moving target.
After tangentially working on this for a long time I'd say that the core issue is so deeply ingrained in human psyche that it may not even be a matter of education (starts early), let alone organization (starts happening when everything else is "set in stone"). There's no organizational structure that fits the types of activities we humans tend to do these days and that can deliver low latency, consistent results at scale. We mitigate issues in one area by accentuating them in others.
You can have one large flat structure but the load on the single coordinating circuit (the manager) will compromise quality. You can split the thing in multiple, individually coordinated units but the added layer of coordination and latency will compromise performance.
Maybe some form of general purpose but not quite full AI, something that combines human like intelligence and engineering like consistency, might be able to do what humans are supposed to but without the variability of humans (which is both good and bad).
Introducing AI into work relations is how you turn every org into Uber or Amazon delivery: platforms where the worker has no real agency on his work, the apotheosis of alienation. I have no doubt that someone will try it (already we see it creeping in for hiring), I just think it will be Fundamentally Bad.
We don't really know what it is simply because we haven't introduced any "real" AI anywhere, let alone:
>> some form of general purpose but not quite full AI
Talking about efficiency as you scale up large organizations, it's inevitable that humans will introduce delays and variability in the work which cannot be eliminated because it's human nature, biologically and psychologically. Since humans can't change on a timescale that makes this discussion relevant, the only way for very large organizations (like large companies or governments) to operate just as efficiently as small ones is if they rely (quasi)exclusively on some AI that's as capable as top individuals at delivering results but with fewer of the drawbacks. Not only would it not operate as 100.000 distinct entities but as one or a few, it would also run consistently and predictably.
There was a fantastic discussion some years ago on ways to design an organization to minimize the tendency to drift towards self-preservation instead of remaining customer-focused.
The HN discussion[1] was started by an article that provided numbers that seemed to suggest that Wikipedia's spending was slowly spiraling out of control.
That really is a fantastic quote and a fantastic thread!
What really stuck out is that Buffet said its the most important thing about Business and he didn't learn it in Business school. Same! I did an MBA and it was the biggest elephant in the room.
Many people would say "more accountability" but I've seen that used successfully to deflect lightning strikes to innocent people who were then fired so... I'd like to know as well.
Competition/choice, which means that self-preservation requires that they care about efficiency. It obviously that wasn't enough here, but definitely tames some inefficiencies.
It's not a perfect remedy, but you have to loop in the people affected by decisions as part of the decision making structure. That is, for example, customers and workers have to be part of the management structure.
This doesn't happen because it would reduce the power of top decision makers and potentially impact profits. e.g. a customer might ask for a chronologically ordered timeline on Facebook, but that would harsh engagement metrics, revenue, etc. If stuff like this did happen more often though, you'd get products and services that more often achieve their stated aims.
I understand what you're saying. When I was working as a Product Manager, I had to try really hard to do things for the customer (after user testing etc.)
Normally the response from management was "but will that increase our profits?", to which my answer was "eventually, yes"
Even if you take engineering you see that adding more links on a chain increases latency and demands more auxiliary circuitry. But at least in engineering you can design each part to do what you want it to do close to perfection. And it will scale better because you can build everything to spec and bin, which is why we automate a lot of tasks. With humans that can't happen. Human "binning" is a constantly moving target.
After tangentially working on this for a long time I'd say that the core issue is so deeply ingrained in human psyche that it may not even be a matter of education (starts early), let alone organization (starts happening when everything else is "set in stone"). There's no organizational structure that fits the types of activities we humans tend to do these days and that can deliver low latency, consistent results at scale. We mitigate issues in one area by accentuating them in others.
You can have one large flat structure but the load on the single coordinating circuit (the manager) will compromise quality. You can split the thing in multiple, individually coordinated units but the added layer of coordination and latency will compromise performance.
Maybe some form of general purpose but not quite full AI, something that combines human like intelligence and engineering like consistency, might be able to do what humans are supposed to but without the variability of humans (which is both good and bad).
Introducing AI into work relations is how you turn every org into Uber or Amazon delivery: platforms where the worker has no real agency on his work, the apotheosis of alienation. I have no doubt that someone will try it (already we see it creeping in for hiring), I just think it will be Fundamentally Bad.
> Introducing AI into work relations is
We don't really know what it is simply because we haven't introduced any "real" AI anywhere, let alone:
>> some form of general purpose but not quite full AI
Talking about efficiency as you scale up large organizations, it's inevitable that humans will introduce delays and variability in the work which cannot be eliminated because it's human nature, biologically and psychologically. Since humans can't change on a timescale that makes this discussion relevant, the only way for very large organizations (like large companies or governments) to operate just as efficiently as small ones is if they rely (quasi)exclusively on some AI that's as capable as top individuals at delivering results but with fewer of the drawbacks. Not only would it not operate as 100.000 distinct entities but as one or a few, it would also run consistently and predictably.
There was a fantastic discussion some years ago on ways to design an organization to minimize the tendency to drift towards self-preservation instead of remaining customer-focused.
The HN discussion[1] was started by an article that provided numbers that seemed to suggest that Wikipedia's spending was slowly spiraling out of control.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235
That really is a fantastic quote and a fantastic thread!
What really stuck out is that Buffet said its the most important thing about Business and he didn't learn it in Business school. Same! I did an MBA and it was the biggest elephant in the room.
But he didn't specify how he arranged things to avoid the problem.
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Many people would say "more accountability" but I've seen that used successfully to deflect lightning strikes to innocent people who were then fired so... I'd like to know as well.
Competition/choice, which means that self-preservation requires that they care about efficiency. It obviously that wasn't enough here, but definitely tames some inefficiencies.
I doubt there is a remedy and personally accept this as a fact of life.