Happy Sunday and welcome to InsideAI! I'm Rob May, CTO at Dianthus and venture partner at PJC. I also run the Investing in AI podcast, which has some new episodes coming after our december break.
Today I want to highlight two interesting insights from the book "Arriving Today" by WSJ tech reporter Christopher Mims. The book examines how things go from a manufacturing facility to your house, and what role technology and automation play along the way. One thing that the book covers, which is counterintuitive but I know from other sources to be true, is that warhouse automation tends to increase overall warehouse employment. When Amazon, for instance, can automate more of a warehouse and lower the cost to run it, they can build smaller warehouses, closer to customers, and more of them, which all use people. The net additions of the people to date are higher than what the automation has replaced.
It's counterintuitive because we tend to look at automation at the unit level rather than at the system level. If there is some step you can't automate, but you do automate other steps, you need more humans now to handle the increased throughput at the non-automatable steps. And that's just one example.
The second issue from the book is that so much of the work of a warehouse worker has been outsourced to algorithms, it's really changed the worker-boss interaction with respect to performance. From the book:
"Amazon has hit upon, and in some cases borrowed, methods of motivating its employees in which its managers never need raise their voice or dress down a subordinate. In the game that all managers play, of carrot and stick, incentive and rebuke, Amazon's managers have the opportunity to always appear sympathetic, to always be on the side of employees. Inside Amazon's warehouses, should they choose to, all the humans get to be united in the face of the real taskmaster in the building: the algorithm."
Bosses now aren't the enforcers. Algorithms determine your performance expectations, your ranking against them, and the human boss just tries to get you help so the algorithm doesn't suggest you get fired.
It's an interesting situation when, for most algorithmic workflows we try to put humans in the loop to supervise and control them, but for HR related algorithms, we might wash our hands of any human involvement. It helps us avoid conflict.
Just another couple of areas where I don't think we fully understand yet the real impact AI is going to have on many parts of work culture. The book is definitely worth reading if you have an interest in the logistics space.
Thanks for reading.
@robmay
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