I think people feel that once the pool of humans required to do a thing diminishes to the point that their occupation is rare enough to be invisible, that is essentially the same as "fully automating" it.
I have certainly never met anyone who works in "loom engineering" in my entire life.
Randomly, I spent an afternoon with a team of loom engineers long ago. In 1989, I took a month-long trip to the USSR. Trips for Americans back then were guided / chaperoned by the Soviet government, with the clear intention of showing off what the Soviet system was capable of. To see their manufacturing prowess, we spent an entire afternoon touring an automated bed-sheet factory and talking with the team that designed and maintained the machines. I don't remember much other than the intense noise and the large number of machines with white cotton sheets coming out.
All the sheets we saw in that factory, and in our hotels, were noticeably thicker and stiffer than American sheets, somewhere between American sheets and denim. When we asked about that, they seemed to feel sorry that we only had thin, flimsy sheets.
You won't be downvoted because of double-standards. You'll be downvoted because this is a hard tangent from the current discussion. I suspect you know that and decide to pre-emptively deflect the reason so as to appear the victim.
Bro, as someone who had brutal insomnia for a couple of years and now sleeps "normally" for whatever that means, I can tell you that I don't think about my sleep quality at all. I'm happy to be sleeping.
If you too sleep "ok" for whatever that means, maybe stop worrying about optimizing it and go do something else less insane.
The charitable reading of "better sleep" is "sleep habits that allow for a healthy amount of sleep". A lot of people have habits that give them insufficient sleep.
My experience is being surrounded by people who sleep eight hours a night and then check their ring data or whatever nonsense to convince themselves that they could do better.
Waking up tired and with the brain full of fog is nearly as fun as not sleeping and ending up tired, with the brain full of fog. Truth be told, most cases of "poor sleep quality" are not as brutal though.
Primary, idiopathic insomnia doesn't really exist. It's almost always anxiety, although a few other mental and physical conditions can also cause it. But more likely anxiety.
Disturbed sleep / inability to settle / anxiety can have physical causes although these are poorly recognized / diagnosed by regular allopathic medicine where I live.
Anecdata: 1) A good friend whose anxiety was largely alleviated (and sleep improved) by recognizing and treating their iron deficiency. 2) I have to (can't take the Western drug which was prescribed any more, and the Western doctors can't seem to bang the rocks together) take herbs for my hypertension but as opposed to the side effects I was experiencing from the drug I joke that all of the "side effects" from the herbs are good, they're targeting imbalances which were not recognized / treated previously and lo and behold I settle and sleep better... which helps reduce the blood pressure.
I would discuss this with you in some detail privately, with bona fides. You should consult with an herbalist. The herbalist I see doesn't mix themes / traditions. The one we've chosen, together, to work with is TCM. Inside of TCM there are "strategies" or themes. We tried a few, the gou teng + tian ma theme seems to work, minor changes happen seasonally. Underneath that are herbs addressing inflammation (ability to settle / get comfortable), immune system (allergies) balancing (post nasal drip / congestion / anxiety), circulatory health (e.g. cold feet), and tonifying some of the major metabolic / detoxifying organs (sweating / digestion). I have a renewed commitment to exercise and making sure I eat the right things for my body.
In the beginning I got hit with something and was misdiagnosed, and almost died; hypertension didn't fit the narrative so was initially ignored. By the way, when you don't sleep for three months it fucks you up. No attempt was ever made to even acknowledge that there might be a root cause for the hypertension. The hypertension drugs worked until they didn't, and they started gaslighting me about it. Bear in mind, in the context of the theme better sleep will help with hypertension (demonstrably true!).
You need to cultivate awareness as well as evidence-based skepticism for this to work. One of the herbs I take interacts with the beta blocker I still take, and if you weren't paying attention it could kill you (nobody told me, or the herbalist, about it). Some of the herbs are pricey, but none are over $80/pound. All in, it costs me about $100 / month, and two hours of my time every three days (to boil herbs). Quite frankly, if the pills work then just do that; but don't treat it as a "solve", get to work and identify some of the root causes and what can be done about it... before they stop working or start making you sick.
On the flipside, there are a lot of businesses that don't open their digital product to multiple markets or verticals because the cost (in money or focus) is too high. Distribution just got a lot easier, arguably about as easy as it should have been in the first place. If you already have a reasonable moat for your product in a smallish market, going broad is a lot more feasible now. I'm doing it now (with partners who own the core product) and its going very well.
Here is a gift to you, I found this on the Internet Archive. it's a cassette dramataziation of Asteroids and Yar's Revenge. I'm not sure how many other people on earth would care fellow Atari-knower, but it's a wonderful little time capsule.
https://archive.org/details/AtariSciFiAdventuresInSound
Unfortunately at this scale, when you are this soft on the message, everyone ignores it and keeps doing what they were doing before. Carrot and stick are both required for performance management at this scale. You can argue whether the bet is worth it or not, but to even take the bet, you need a lot more than some resources and a "please".
If performance was the true goal then we'd just naturally see slow adopters unperform and phase out of that company. If you make good tooling available and it is significantly impactful the results will be extremely obvious - and, just speaking from a point of view of psychology, if the person next to you is able to do their job in half the time because they experimented with new tooling _and sees some personal benefit from it_ then you'll be curious and experiment too!
It might be that these companies don't care about actual performance or it might be that these companies are too cheap/poorly run to reward/incentivize actual performance gains but either way... the fault is on leadership.
Two things: 1) Employees are not that easy to replace. These employees have already been onboarded, screened, and proven, at least to this point, to be the type of people the company wants. If an employee starts lagging behind solely because they are stubborn about adopting AI, yes, the company can fire them, but then it has to go through the entire hiring process again and risk bringing in someone new, when it could have simply improved performance by helping the existing employee use AI. 2) Companies themselves have performance metrics that are compared to those of other companies. If an employee is not using AI and has reduced output, then the company’s overall output and its profits are affected. No investor cares if the reason is that other companies have a higher rate of AI adoption; investors care that the company was not able to get its employees to use AI effectively to increase profits.
It's not inevitable, it's just poor leadership. I've seen changes at large organizations take without being crudely pushed top-down and you'd better believe I've seen top-down initiatives fail, so "performance management" is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Performance management isn't rating how people are doing. It's transforming the resources of the company into something that you want it to do. If they want to transform the current state of the company into something that has AI use as a core capability, that is performance management.
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