employment

The End Of Non-Compete.

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

The FTC banned non-competes agreements, and I wish that this had come a few decades earlier. Non-competes kept me from starting businesses and even working for competitors in the past, though more as a matter of honoring the agreement than any legal threat by a former employer.

When you do specialized work for companies, as an employee or a contractor, that non-compete agreement was always a pain. A silent tyranny.

Word around the water cooler always speculated that non-competes were unconstitutional (13th Amendment), but all the ‘legal experts’ around the water cooler were not people who would pay my lawyers.

The 13th Amendment provides that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist.” If the protection against involuntary servitude means anything for workers, it means that they have a right to leave their jobs to seek other employment. Indeed, one of the few effective bargaining chips for workers who wish to improve their wages and working conditions is the ability to threaten to quit if one’s demands are not met. Members of the Reconstruction Congress understood that employee mobility was essential to freedom from involuntary servitude. Enslaved people obviously lacked the ability to leave their masters. Even after they were no longer enslaved, without mobility, people freed from slavery would have been forced to work for their former masters. The Reconstruction Congress enforced the 13th Amendment with the 1867 Anti-Peonage Act, prohibiting employers from requiring their workers to enter into contracts that bind them to their employers. Non-compete clauses have similar effects because they prohibit workers from leaving their jobs to find other similar jobs.

“Non-Compete Clauses and the 13th Amendment: Why the New FTC Rule Is Not Only Good Policy but Constitutionally Mandated“, Rebecca Zietlow, JuristNews, Feb 13th, 2023

Employers are stating that they are concerned about trade secrets and so forth, which on the surface seems legitimate – but that’s what the confidentiality agreements are for. Also, a lack of non-competes means that the value of employees to employers is higher. If you don’t want your people to go work for a competitor, don’t let them go. So many companies that I did leave were terrible at listening to employee concerns – not about themselves, but about the company, making jobs unnecessarily political.

Navigating office politics is… tiresome. In fact, I left one company simply because I got tired of the DBA who kept screwing up but was seemingly protected by the business team because he drank with them. He squandered quite a bit of their money shoring up his position by insisting on databases he knew when open source databases could have done the same job much more cost-effectively. I had a non-compete, so I didn’t even bother working within that company’s niche.

And I could have. I had offers. Yet I just didn’t feel like dealing with a vengeful bit of litigation, and that business team could be vengeful. I saw it a few times.

That’s just one story.

Most of these agreements protect employers, and that’s fair to the extent that any work done for them is basically a commissioned work in the realm of software engineering.

I hope this isn’t screwed up, I hope that the Chamber of Commerce appeal fails – not that I want to screw over employers, but because employees shouldn’t get screwed over when they’re stuck in a dead end and have built up expertise in a niche. I’m hoping this gives a better balance.

At any point in the future, I could be either an employer or employee.

Beyond The Moat.

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

In the world we like to talk about since it reflects ourselves, technology weaves dendritically through our lives. Much of it is invisible to us in that it is taken for granted.

The wires overhead spark with Nikola Tesla’s brilliance, the water flowing in pipes dating all the way back 3000-4000 BC in the Indus Valley, the propagation of gas for cooking and heat and the automobiles we spend way too much time in.

Now, even internet access for many is taken for granted as social media platforms vie for timeshares of our lives, elbowing more and more from many by giving people what they want. Except Twitter, of course, but for the most part social media is the new Hotel California – you can check out any time you like, but you may never leave as long as people you interacted with are there.

This is why when I read Panic about overhyped AI risk could lead to the wrong kind of regulation, I wondered about what wasn’t written. It’s a very good article which underlines the necessity of asking the right questions to deal with regulation – and attempting to undercut some of the hype against it. Written by a machine learning expert, Divyansh Kaushik, and by Matt Korda, it reads really well about what I agree could be a bit too much backlash against the artificial intelligence technologies.

Yet their jobs are safe. In Artificial Extinction, I addressed much the same thing but not as an expert but as a layperson who sees the sparking wires, flowing water, cars stuck in traffic, and so on. It is not far-fetched to see that the impacts of artificial intelligence are beyond the scope of what experts on artificial intelligence think. It’s what they omit in the article that is what should be more prominent.

I’m not sure we’re asking the right questions.

The economics of jobs gets called into question as people who spent their lives doing something that can be replaced. This in turn affects a nation’s economy, which in turn affects the global economy. China wants to be a world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030 but given their population and history of human rights, one has to wonder what they’ll do with all those suddenly extra people.

Authoritarian governments could manipulate machine learning and deep learning to assure everyone’s on the same page in the same version of the same book quite easily, with a little tweaking. Why write propaganda when you can have a predictive text algorithm with a thesaurus of propaganda strapped to it’s chest? Maybe in certain parts of Taliban controlled Afghanistan, it will detect that the user is female and give it a different set of propaganda, telling the user to stay home and stop playing with keyboards.

Artificial Extinction, KnowProSE.com, May 31st 2023.

These concerns are not new, but they are made more plausible with artificial intelligence because who controls them controls much more than social media platforms. We have really no idea what they’re training the models on, where that data came from, and let’s face it – we’re not that great with who owns whose data. Henrietta Lacks immediately comes to mind.

My mother wrote a poem about me when I joined the Naval Nuclear Propulsion program, annoyingly pointing out that I had stored my socks in my toy box as a child and contrasting it with my thought at the time that science and technology can be used for good. She took great joy in reading it to audiences when I was present, and she wasn’t wrong to do so even as annoying as I found it.

To retain a semblance of balance between humanity and technology, we need to look at our own faults. We have not been so great about that, and we should evolve our humanity to keep pace with our technology. Those in charge of technology, be it social media or artificial intelligence, are far removed from the lives of people who use their products and services despite them making money from the lives of these very same people. It is not an insult, it is a matter of perception.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, seemed cavalier about how artificial intelligence will impact the livelihoods of some. While we all stared at what was happening with the Titan, or wasn’t, the majority of people I knew were openly discussing what sorts of people would spend $250K US to go to a very dark place to go look at a broken ship. Extreme tourism, they call it, and it’s within the financial bracket of those who control technologies now. The people who go on such trips to space, or underwater, are privileged and in that privilege have no perspective on how the rest of the world gets by.

That’s the danger, but it’s not the danger to them and because they seem cavalier about the danger, it is a danger. These aren’t elected officials who are controlled through democracy, as much of a strange ride that is.

These are just people who sell stuff everybody buys, and who influence those who think themselves temporarily inconvenienced billionaires to support their endeavors.

It’s not good. It’s not really bad either. Yet we should be aspiring toward ‘better’.

Speaking for myself, I love the idea of artificial intelligence, but that love is not blind. There are serious impacts, and I agree that they aren’t the same as nuclear arms. Where nuclear arms can end societies quickly, how we use technology and even how many are ignorant of technology can cause something I consider worse: A slow and painful end of societies as we know them when we don’t seem to have any plans for the new society.

I’d feel a lot better about what experts in silos have to say if they… weren’t in silos, or in castles with moats protecting them from the impacts of what they are talking about. This is pretty big. Blue collar workers are under threat from smarter robots, white collar workers are under threat, and even the creative are wondering what comes next as they no longer are as needed for images, video, etc.

It is reasonable for a conversation that discusses these things to happen, and this almost always happens after things have happened.

We should be aspiring to do better than that. It’s not the way the world works now, and maybe it’s time we changed that. We likely won’t, but with every new technology, we should have a few people pointing that out in the hope that someone might listen.

We need leaders to understand what lays beyond the moat, and if they don’t, stop considering them leaders. That’s why the United States threw a tea party in Boston, and that’s why the United States is celebrating Independence Day today.

Happy Independence Day!

Where’s Your Parachute? AI and Jobs.

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

People working to make ends meet generally don’t have the time to worry about artificial intelligence taking their jobs until it’s too late. That’s already beginning to happen.

“…Earlier this year, a report from Goldman Sachs said that AI could potentially replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs.

Any job losses would not fall equally across the economy. According to the report, 46% of tasks in administrative and 44% in legal professions could be automated, but only 6% in construction and 4% in maintenance…

…This month IKEA said that, since 2021, it has retrained 8,500 staff who worked in its call centres as design advisers.

The furniture giant says that 47% of customer calls are now handled by an AI called Billie…”

“The workers already replaced by artificial intelligence“, BBC, Ian Rose, 16 Jun 2023

The article starts off with a copyrwriting team that may have lost their jobs to a large language model (AI), and a redemption of a human doing voiceovers.

This is an issue, and an issue that much of the world is not prepared for. An AI, despite it’s corporate entity being given human-hood by law, doesn’t have a family to feed.

Technology and humanity need to find a way to coexist properly, and I don’t know that present systems allow for that. I’m not even sure what the right questions are so that we can get the right answers.

Thoughts? What do you think needs to happen?

Trinidad and Tobago and/vs AI.

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

When I wrote ‘Artificial Extinction‘, I briefly touched on coverage related to artificial intelligence here in Trinidad and Tobago. It’s hard to explain just how out of mind it is, so I’ll just write a bit of the local scene.

Today, as I stood in line waiting an annoying amount of time waiting to pay for the 5l bottle of water at a local convenience store, I glanced at the headlines. As usual, there was someone having trouble with something at the head of the line, the other register was closed, and the line formed.

One of the benefits of that line is that I get to run my eyes across the front pages of the local newspapers: Newsday, Trinidad Express and Trinidad Guardian.

The Rastafarian gentleman in front of me found something of interest in the Trinidad Express. I saw something about the need for Constitutional Reform, a picture of “Indian Arrival Day Stalwarts”, ‘Paradise in Peril’ and a plea from the mother of a kidnapping victim. Having been back and forth over the decades, the news seems to say the same with only names changing. The politicians play politics, the crime has spiraled so long that it is now in control of the criminals, and nobody has fresh ideas. They all seem to be foreign and abused ideas, much like some of the used cars you can buy from Japan.

This is the canvas upon which local news is painted daily. I thought about seeing Trinidad and Tobago represented on Planet Earth (Episode 6) through Grand Riviere Village’s volunteer work to assist and protect the leatherback turtles. when I did a web search, I found the leatherback turtle site offline (something I’m considering digging into). That’s a shame. Keeping a website online for something with international attention seems important.

I get home, walking past the condo’s office, I wave briefly at the administrator who was busy talking with someone. 15 years as a corporate secretary, retired, decades of experience that could soon be replaced with something purchased off the shelf. The latent thought of my own experience being replaced looms quietly in the background as I enter the elevator, my thoughts on how to connect the local perspective on technology and thus artificial intelligence to the larger global perspective of “this could end very badly“.

My friends and neighbors are more worried about their family’s security than some online application spitting out gobs of text when asked a question. In a land where there are no questions, no one needs an oracle. The economic diversity of Trinidad and Tobago is simply not there, the oil money stolen or squandered (or both), and the youths see increasingly little opportunity outside of crime, as we talked about while I was at the barber shop last week.

Artificial intelligence is not going to help with these things, because these are largely broken systems that those who profit from do not want to fix. ChatGPT can go blue in the face telling the politicians what they should do. They’ve been told what it has to offer thousands of times before over the decades. The faces largely have not changed, only grown older and in one case distinctly more cadaverous.

Years ago, I had a Minister message me once because something I wrote, and he asked where I got the data from – I cited the source that he should have been aware of, the open data portal of Trinidad and Tobago. He was agog. He’d been asking for that information for over a year and no one seemed to know where it was. The website has since been updated, the data not so much.

Meanwhile, the largest employer in Trinidad and Tobago is the government, where many good people participate in overcomplicated wheels of bureaucracy. We could use technology to replace much of that, but then where would the people work? And since they vote, who would they vote for if they lose their jobs?

With this context, now, I can now discuss AI in Trinidad and Tobago in the context of jobs, particularly the last 3 paragraphs:

“…Taking charge of this rapidly evolving scenario of workplace change will demand one fundamental and overdue evolution in governance, the continuous gathering and distribution of actionable information about how this country operates.

It was a note that Jonathan Cumberbatch, Assistant VP, Human Resources and Administration at UTT touched on cautiously when he noted that, “Data drives most of the conversation outside of TT, but we don’t have a sense of that in TT.”

The propensity of governance to proceed on feelings, hunches and political expedience might have worked in the past, but the national distaste for transparently gathered, publicly available information cannot continue into an era hallmarked by a reliance on reliable, continuously updated datasets.”

“AI and your job“, Mark Lyndersay, TechNewsTT and BitDepth#1408 for May 29, 2023

Of course, it wasn’t a global roundup of people related to AI, just those with local interests talking to the local Chamber of Commerce related to their products. Microsoft was definitely there, others… not here.

The short answer is that Trinidad and Tobago isn’t ready. Neither is most of the rest of the world, which is why there’s concern by some. I’ve seen firsthand government offices and even business offices completely ignore data driven approaches. Just recently, I proposed starting with the basics in the condo’s office, only to hear that without actual data they’re just pushing forward into a ticket system to solve all the problems. In time they will find it creates new ones, but that will be another story.

The point is that if you can’t even do data driven stuff, keep a volunteer website up when there’s international attention, the wave of artificial intelligence that will drive the world economy will leave many people stranded on islands, perhaps even twin island Republics. What will be done about this?

Maybe they’ll talk about it in Parliament. Then, if history repeats itself, nothing will happen.

Or, things could change. Things definitely should change, but those changes need to happen faster and faster as the government slides into the Pitch Lake, dragging it’s citizens with it. .

The AI Future On Mankind’s Canvas

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

Doctor Leia.I met her and the young Brazilian woman on the flight from Miami to Orlando, this young Doctor who had an interview in Ocala. She was to drive across to Ocala, to the East, to see if she would get the job. She didn’t look old enough to be a Doctor, but I’ve passed the age threshold where doctors were younger than myself years ago. We talked about medicine and medical administration for a while even as I checked up on the nervous Brazilian high school graduate. I sat, a thorn between two roses, all the while thinking:

What sort of world were they entering? Doc Leia, a graduate from The University of the West Indies, off to Ocala, and the young woman to my right, off to see the sights as a reward for having survived so many years of schooling. They were both easily younger than most of my nieces. The Doctor had already become heavily invested in her future – medical school was a daunting path and might have been one I would have pursued with the right opportunities. The other was about to invest in her future and it bothered me that there wasn’t as clear a path as there used to be.

Artificial intelligence – diagnosing patients on the other side of the world – is promising to change medicine itself. The first AI attorney, ‘Ross’, had been hired by a NYC firm. The education system in the United States wasn’t factoring this sort of thing in (unless maybe if you’re in the MIT Media Lab), so I was pretty sure that the education systems in the Caribbean and Latin America weren’t factoring it in. I’ve been playing with Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning myself, and was amazed at what already could be done.

The technology threat to jobs – to employment – has historically been robotics, something that has displaced enough workers to cause a stir over the last decades – but it has been largely thought that technology would only replace the blue collar jobs. Hubris. Any job that requires research, repetition, and can allow for reduced costs for companies is a target. Watson’s bedside manner might be a little more icy than House, but the results aren’t fiction.

What are the jobs of the future, for those kids in, starting or just finished with a tertiary education? It’s a gamble by present reckoning. Here are a few thoughts, though:

  • A job that requires legal responsibility is pretty safe, so far. While Watson made that diagnosis, for legal reasons I am certain that licensed doctors were the ones that dealt with the patient, as well as gave the legal diagnosis.
  • Dealing well with humans, which has been important for centuries, has just become much more important – it separates us from AI. So far.
  • Understanding the technology and, more importantly, the dynamic limits of the technology will be key.

Even with that, even as fast food outlets switch to touchscreens for ordering their food (imagine the disease vectors off of that!), even as AI’s become more and more prominent, the landscape is being shaken by technology driven by financial profit.

And I don’t think that it’s right that there’s no real plan for that. It’s coming, there is no stopping that, but what are we as a society doing to prepare the new work force for what is to come? What can be done?

Conversations might be a good place to start.