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By Jane Palmer
Imagine your boss was a machine. For some people it s almost a reality, says
Jane Palmer, so will we all end up working for robots and algorithms?
In 1910, a strike broke out at the Watertown Arsenal near Boston, when a
manager with a stopwatch stood behind a worker, timing the craftsman s
performance.
No tyrant or slave driver in the ecstasy of his more delirious dream ever
sought to place upon abject slaves a condition more repugnant, said one labour
leader.
The factory was instigating new scientific management practices innovated by
Frederick Taylor and known as Taylorism to increase productivity and
efficiency. But the workers rebelled. Taylorism, which required industry to run
factories like military operations with managers barking out orders to hapless
subordinates, treated workers as mindless drones, the strikers argued.
Under the Taylor system, managers armed with stopwatches timed how long workers
took to complete their tasks (Wikipedia /CC-PD-Mark1.0)
Fast-forward to the present day, and a new form of hyper-efficient management
may be about to arrive, but with a technological twist. In the never-ending
quest for productivity, automation has already come to many spheres of
industry. If so, your next boss might not be a tyrant or even a softie. Your
next boss could be a machine.
The idea that robots and algorithms will take jobs is a common concern about
the future. As Bill Gates argued earlier this year: 20 years from now, labour
demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. Automation has
already removed the need for humans in many workplaces, from building cars in
factories to taking bookings in call centres. And scientists at Birmingham
University in the UK are testing whether an autonomous security guard can do a
real job in a working office.
However, one question rarely asked is: what would it be like to work for a
machine? After all, a mixture of humans and machines is a more likely scenario
for future workplaces.
Bare bones
To an extent, basic machine managers are already here, especially in the online
world. On Amazon s Mechanical Turk an internet marketplace where people
called Turkers offer their services much of the actual people coordination is
done by an algorithm. The Mechanical Turk software lists available tasks,
everything from drawing a logo to transcribing audio recordings. Based on the
past performance of Turkers, an algorithm will place them higher or lower down
the list of potential candidates for a job or adjust their payment scales.
Other services, such as MobileWorks, use similar software to recruit and pay
workers for small tasks such as taking a photo or checking a spreadsheet all
independently of any human hand. And Freelancer.com, which advertises jobs to
people such as software engineers, writers, or architects, has software that
decides to dish out more work to the higher-performing freelancers.
While these algorithms are not particularly autonomous by the standards of a
human being, they do perform the bare bones tasks of an employer: task
allocation, evaluation and payment for a job done well.
In some warehouse jobs, workers are kept to a timetable by a handheld device
which counts down the time they have to complete a task (Rex Features)
Some algorithms have even begun cracking the whip as people go about their
work, much like the Taylorism stopwatch-holders in 20th Century factories. The
writer Mac McClelland, for example, recently described her time spent working
in an online retailer s warehouse. Each worker was given a handset that told
them where to go in the warehouse to pick up an item to prepare it for
delivery. McClelland told how the handset would count down how many seconds she
had to reach her destination, as well as tracking her underperformance if she
overran its timing. While a human boss was ultimately responsible for her line
management, for most of the day, it was the machine that was in charge.
So could algorithmic bosses eventually make their way into the office, where
humans still rule? There are some signs that we might be headed that way, at
least in terms of the outsourcing of many management decisions. Many companies
are beginning to use people analytics historic information on an individual
s online behaviour to analyse prospective job candidates. Analytics teams in
human-resources departments of large corporations such as Google and General
Motors, for example, use algorithms to comb through the vast amounts of data
collected on online interactions. In goes every forum comment, tweet, or public
Facebook status, and out pops a number representing a candidate s suitability
for a position.
Unbending rigidity?
Could software designed to sift through an individual s data trail not just
hire employees, but also evaluate them, and possibly even fire them as well? It
s unclear, but it does raise serious questions about how much autonomy we
might want to give algorithms in workplaces.
Some are bullish about the idea of algorithmic managers, however. Honestly, it
is actually better for workers having computerised bosses, says Daniel Barowy,
who created Automan, software to delegate tricky tasks to human workers via
platforms such as Mechanical Turk. Machines are unbiased and unaffected by
office politics and daily mood swings unless of course they are programmed to
be.
While Teresa Amabile, professor and director of research at Harvard Business
School, isn t quite so emphatic, she believes that automated systems may have
the edge on human bosses in some instances. Amabile coauthored a book, The
Progress Principle, which was based on a multi-year analysis of more than 200
workers diaries. For happier and more productive employees, she says,
clear-cut directions, an atmosphere where it is OK to make mistakes, and
autonomy proved essential.
The labour force has already shrunk in areas such as car factories amid
increasing mechanisation (Getty Images)
The right algorithm could certainly achieve some of these goals: It could
provide clear instructions, process information at lightning speed and
multitask with an almost negligible margin of error, removing the frustrating
bottlenecks that frequently pile up at the bosses door. And although computers
can be picky pedants when it comes to employee errors, they don t micromanage
or make mistakes personal a frequent source of office malaise.
But efficiency and unbending rigidity could also be the downside of machine
bosses. How do they account for an erstwhile good employee who has a spot of
poor health, or one is distracted on the job because of a sick child?
One-on-one
I think that it will be a way long time before computers will make good bosses
because they just don't have enough nuance, says Sandy Pentland, the director
of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at MIT, who believes that his research using
specialised electronic badges backs up his opinion. The badges record about
100 data points a minute about wearers social interactions such as how much
they talk, how much they listen, and their tone of voice.
Using these badges on about 2,500 people in different organisations, Pentland
was able to tease out how bosses can interact with workers to promote
productivity and job happiness. It is not just words or facts that matter, it
is how you say it, Pentland says. There is a human side that goes on in a
discussion and that is just as important.
A robot manager would be immune to micromanagement or office politics - but
would that always be a good thing? (Science Photo Library)
Pentland s assertion is backed by results from Google s 2009 research, Project
Oxygen, where statisticians analysed more than 10,000 observations about
managers from performance reviews and feedback surveys. The project found the
best managers were those that made time for one-on-one meetings and who took an
interest in employees lives and careers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, people perform better with encouragement, respect and a
sense of affinity for where they work. To have these you need a real human,
right there in front of you, Amabile says.
And if the eventual backlash against Taylorism in the 20th Century taught us
anything, it is that dehumanising work comes at a cost, most of all to human
happiness. Robots and software may soon be more than capable of doing your boss
s job, but the ultimate question may be whether you would choose to work for
them.