this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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If anything. AI could be used to replace managers ๐ I mean lots of management seems to be just pushing paper to me. Ideal to be handled by AI. But I think we still need people to do the real work for quite some time to come. Especially software architecture and coding (complex) stuff ain't easy. Neither is project management. So I guess even some managers can stay.
Good management is almost all people skills. It needs to be influenced by domain knowledge for sure, but it's almost all about people.
You can probably match trash managers, but you won't replace remotely competent ones
I'm not even sure about the "people skills" of ChapGPT. Maybe it's good at that. It always says ...you have to consider this side but also the other side... ...This is like that, however it might... It can weasel itself out of situations (as it did in this video). It makes a big effort to keep a very friendly tone in all circumstances. I think OpenAI has put a lot of effort in ChatGPT having something that resembles a portion of people skills.
I've used those capabilities to rephrase emails that needed to tell some uncomfortable truths but at the same time not scare someone away. And it did a halfway decent job. Better than I could do. And we already see those people skills in use by the companies who replace their first level support with AI. I read somewhere it has a better customer satisfaction rate than a human powered callcenter. It's good at pacifying people, being nice to them and answering the most common 90% of questions over and over again.
So I'm not sure what to make of this. I think my point still remains valid. AI (at least ChatGPT) is orders of magnitude better at people skills than at programming. I'm not sure what kind of counterexamples we have... Sure, it can't come to your desk, look you in the eyes and see if you're happy or need something. Because it doesn't have any eyes. But at the same time that's a thing I rarely see with average human managers in big offices, either...
Using flowery language isn't "people skills".
People skills means handling conflict and competing objectives between people fairly and efficiently. It's a trait based almost entirely on empathy, with a level of ingenuity mixed in, and GPT isn't anywhere within many orders of magnitude of either. It will be well after it "can code" that it does anything remotely in the neighborhood of the soft skills of being a competent manager.
Yeah. I mean the fundamental issue is: ChatGPT isn't human. It just mimics things. That's the way it generates text, audio and images. And it's also the way it handles "empathy". It mimicks what it's learned from human interactions during training.
But in the end: Does it really matter where it comes from and why? I mean the goal of a venture is to produce or achieve something. And that isn't measured in where it comes from. But in actual output. I don't want to speculate too much. But despite not having real empathy, it could theoretically achieve the same thing by faking it well enough. And that has been proven in some narrow tasks already. We have customer satisfaction rates. And quite some people saying it helps them with different things. We need to measure that and do some more studies of what's the actual outcome of replacing something with AI. It could very well be that our perspective is wrong.
And with that said: I tried roleplaying with AI. It seems to have some theory of mind. Not really of course. But it get's what I'm hinting at. The desires and behaviour of characters. And so on. Lot's of models are very agreeable. Some can role play conflict. I think the current capabilities of these kinds of AI are enough to fake some things well enough to get somewhere and be actually useful. I don't say it has or hasn't people skills. I think it's somewhere on the spectrum between the two. I can't really tell where because I havent yet read any research considering this context.
And of course there is a big difference between everyday tasks and handling a situation that went completely haywire. We have to factor that in. But in reality there are ways to handle that. For example AI and humans could split up the tasks amongst them. And things can get escalated and humans make difficult decisions. But that could already mean 80% of the labor gets replaced.
The actual empathy (actually being able to understand people's perspectives) is how you get to places everyone is OK with. Empathy isn't language. It's using the understanding of what people feel and want to find solutions that work well for everyone. Without understanding that perspective at a deep and intuitive level, you don't solve actual problems. You don't routinely preempt problems by seeing them before they have a chance of happening and working around them.
Actual leadership isn't stepping in when people are almost at blows and parroting "conflict resolution" at them. It's understanding who your people are and what they want and putting them in position to succeed.
I get what you're saying. I think we're getting a bit philosophical here with the empathy. My point was: Sometimes, what matters is if something get's a job done. And I see some reason to believe it might become capable, despite doing it differently and having shortcomings.
I think it's true that empathy get's the job done. But I think it's a logical flaw to say, because empathy can do it, it's ONLY empathy that can do it. It might very well be the case that it's not like that. I think we don't know yet. I'm not set on one side or the other. I just want to see some research done and get a definitive answer instead of speculating.
And I see some reason to believe it's more complicated than that. What I outlined earlier is that it can apply something loosely resembling a theory of mind and get some use out of that. But we can also log every interaction of someone. Do sentiment analysis and find out with great accuracy if someone sitting at a computer is happy, angry, resignating or frustrated. AI can do that all day for each employer and outperform any human manager. On the flipside it can't do other things. And we already have "algorithms" for example on TikTok, Youtube etc that can tell a lot about someone and predict things about them. That works quite well as we all know. All of that makes me believe there is some potential to do things like what we're currently discussing.
I'm not arguing philosophy. I'm saying that the core definition of the job description is "understand people and use that understanding to get shit done". A middle manager doesn't decide strategy. They just make their team work well together. Understanding people is the whole job.
TikTok and YouTube algorithms don't (and don't have any desire to) care what people actually want or value. They just care what results in the highest amount of time wasted on their platform, and it results in creators explicitly telling their viewers (who also don't want the nonsense) that they're doing bullshit like clickbait thumbnails and titles because YouTube makes it impossible to succeed if they don't. They (along with almost all other social media) are prime examples of what bad, toxic algorithms look like.
I think the question then becomes: What's more important (and to whom?) Doing what's in the job description? Or actually getting the job done? These are two separate things. And I see arguments for both, depending on context.
And you have a point with the algorithms. They follow the goals that they're given by their masters. Exactly to the outcome you've outlined. But the goal is configurable. You could as well give it the goal to maximise team efficiency. Or employer satisfaction. Or company revenue. Practically anything that you can obtain some metric.
The job description is the only reason the position exists. It's the entire value add. If you aren't doing it, the job isn't getting done.
But going a level deeper, the whole position only exists because a company wants to get some job done. Describing it is just a means to achieve that. Not a thing in itself. I think we're circling about what I consider being the main point: What matters is if a job get's done. If you do it with a description and it gets the job done, it gets the job done. If you manage to go without and it also gets the job done, it also gets the job done. If you manage people by people and that gets the job done or if AI does it and also gets the job done... Delivering some goods is how a company makes profit. They don't really care how it's done because that's not what it's about. It just needs to fulfill a few criteria. Be profitable (have a good price/performance ratio) and be sustainable/reliable... It doesn't matter to them if it's AI, a human, with a description or without...
And I already had jobs where there wasn't any proper job description (just something on the paper). That usually leads to severe issues if there is any dispute. But nonetheless it worked out well for me and my employer. I know people who are in similar situations. Or had their job descriptions updated because things changed. So I don't welcome that as it will result in issues. And it shouldn't be like that. But speaking from experience, a job can be done without a description if circumstances are right. I also regularly see people organize their old stuff when retiring, read their old job description from decades ago for fun and that's not really what they've been doing the last 20 years.
I think our fundamental disagreement is, you say it's currently usually done like this and therefore that's the only way to do it. That might be a conservative perspective. But by logic, that doesn't follow. Just because something works some way, that doesn't exclude there being other possibilities or ways to achieve the same thing.
The job of middle management is "handle the human elements of the team (and potentially customers/vendors) so the team can be productive". There is no meaningful other job to do, excluding some bookkeeping stuff that can be done better with any other software but AI. The human parts are the only things that need to be done.
Don't even need an AI. Just teach a parrot to say "let's circle back on this" and "how many story points is that?"
"Its easy, right. Just ..."