An artificial intelligence (AI) system designed to monitor workflows and detect inefficient parts has been attracting flak online. Developed by Optifye.Ai, a member of startup accelerator Y Combinator’s current crop of Unicorn foals (as hoped), this software alerts managers to what’s slowing operations down.
To advertise it, Y Combinator put out a video clip that shows the startup’s co-founders Vivaan Baid and Kushal Mohta role-playing a manager and shop-floor supervisor who spot a laggard on the assembly line, thanks to AI-enabled cameras and computer-vision software, and pull him up. The worker says he’s having a bad day, but the duo look at his work-log on a screen and tell him it’s more like he’s having a bad month.
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The ad triggered protests of “modern slavery” and Y Combinator took the clip off its feed. But then, what goes online tends to stay online. Grabs of it have surfaced elsewhere, only to generate more howls of protest.
Why this should be is a good question.
Long before AI, foremen and supervisors have been monitoring shop-floor workflow and hauling up those who slow everybody else down by their individual laxity. If this exercise goes digital, easing supervision and turning it more effective, it hardly amounts to slavery. Over-exploitation would have traction as a charge if an assembly line were made to move too fast for workers to reasonably keep pace.
Such outrage over the use of AI at work diverts attention from the real threat posed by this technology to workers: displacement. Meta’s boss Mark Zuckerberg, for example, reportedly plans to use AI to generate much of the software code the company requires.
Programmers would still be needed, of course, to check what AI churns out, separate valid code from junk and validate it. But there is little doubt that Meta’s demand for human coders will shrink—unless it needs so much more code that they will all be given superior roles at a higher level of productivity.
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Can this happen? History offers a clue.
When the motor car replaced the horse-drawn carriage, wranglers, cartwrights and wheelers lost their jobs. But then, entire avenues of new economic activity opened up to absorb workers on a scale nobody had imagined. The prosperity generated by Industrial Age mechanization let a far larger number of people lead far better lives.
The world had a headcount of about 1.6 billion in the year 1900. Today, we are more than 8 billion, and nobody would want to trade our lives with those of our ancestors. Even royalty back then did not enjoy the comforts that we often take for granted.
How far we have come is broadly a story of productivity. It’s what rescued economics from its ‘dismal science’ label of Malthusian vintage and the ingenuity that went into that rescue holds the key to an AI-driven future.
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So long as it takes creativity to imagine new ways to enrich our lives, humans will have a role. It’s for us to envision what AI can do for us, whether it involves cracking protein structures to invent new therapies or recalibrating a magnetic field that contains the plasma in which nuclear fusion can take place at temperatures in excess of 10,000° Celsius.
Innumerable uses of AI are waiting to be explored. To adapt, education must shift from the mastery of old knowledge to the sharpening of critical thinking. If anything deserves outrage, it’s how lax we have been on this front, not a workflow tracker that promises marginal gains in efficiency.
