A New Corporate AI Can Read Your Emails - and Your Mind (fortune.com)

"Okay, as of last night, who were the people who were most disgruntled...? Show me the top 10." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares their report on a fascinating Fortune magazine article: "One company says it can spot 'insider threats' before they happen -- by reading all your workers' email." Working with a former CIA consultant, Stroz Friedberg developed a software that "combs through an organization's emails and text messages -- millions a day, the company says -- looking for high usage of words and phrases that language psychologists associate with certain mental states and personality profiles...

"Many companies already have the ability to run keyword searches of employees' emails, looking for worrisome words and phrases like 'embezzle' and 'I loathe this job'. But the Stroz Friedberg software, called Scout, aspires to go a giant step further, detecting indirectly, through unconscious syntactic and grammatical clues, workers' anger, financial or personal stress, and other tip-offs that an employee might be about to lose it... It uses an algorithm based on linguistic tells found to connote feelings of victimization, anger, and blame."
The article reports that 27% of cyber-attacks "come from within," according to a study of 562 organizations that was partly conducted by the U.S. Secret Service, with 43% of the surveyed companies reporting an "insider attack" within the last year.

Comments

Morons

[nospam007]

We use our smartphone's private mail to trash the bosses.

Re:Morons

[Anonymous Coward]

We use our smartphone's private mail to trash the bosses.

That's why they're looking for subconscious cues* instead of explicit statements of anger.

* technical term : thoughtcrime

Re:Morons

[davester666]

You DESERVE to get caught if you use the word "embezzle" in an email you send through the company's email system.

Re:Morons

[Mikkeles]

Probably auto-corrected from bambozzle :)

Re:Morons

[Sperbels]

Found the Scientologist.

Re:Morons

[Sperbels]

I've used the word embezzle maybe a dozen times in email at work. All of them in jest. It would be hilarious if I was flagged for review every time I did this.

Re:Morons

[Hylandr]

+1 Insightful

Re: Morons

[MatthewH.Owens]

Hahahahah! Much truth there!!!

Fear mongering

[nrasch]

Frankly I think this is nothing more than fear mongering. I also feel sorry for anyone accused by this software; I'm sure having to crawl on the carpet and somehow argue against some shady, dubious algorithm will be a wonderful experience.

Also, do people really send emails from their corporate account with the words, "I loathe this job"? Give me a break.

Re:Fear mongering

[I75BJC]

nrasch asked, 'Also, do people really send emails from their corporate account with the words, "I loathe this job"?" Yes, yes, they do. Never underestimate that familiarity can lead to contempt. Or in this case, forgetting that nothing is private on company email.

Who is talking about "accusations"?

[mi]

I also feel sorry for anyone accused by this software

Any place I worked for before would've used the flags raised by such software only to alert the manager. It would be up to him then to decide how (and even whether) to act.

Staffing is a difficult and expensive part of running a corporation. Maybe, not for burger-joints — but certainly for anything using corporate e-mail to begin with. Firing or even disciplining an otherwise useful employee over his being tired or experiencing a financial strain is rather counter-productive.

Re:Who is talking about "accusations"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a complete and utter cretin, or an absolute tool. It's not really worth it to discern which.

Many of the people who are scathing about poor internal processes are exactly those people who are positioned to, and capable of, effecting change in an organization. If they are not permitted to discuss the areas that are wrong, the tactics necessary to navigate a block, and bounce their ideas off other colleagues who they know will not react hysterically at internal communications that wouldn't pass the marketing department, then the business will flounder all the faster.

Re:Who is talking about "accusations"?

[Anonymous Coward]

can act a a malignant cancer eating away at the guts of the company

You're assuming managers give a flying fsck about what's good for the company.

Re:Who is talking about "accusations"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a complete and utter cretin, or an absolute tool. It's not really worth it to discern which.

Many of the people who are scathing about poor internal processes are exactly those people who are positioned to, and capable of, effecting change in an organization. If they are not permitted to discuss the areas that are wrong, the tactics necessary to navigate a block, and bounce their ideas off other colleagues who they know will not react hysterically at internal communications that wouldn't pass the marketing department, then the business will flounder all the faster.

Agreed. Certainly it is simpler to work with employees that will accept anything, no matter how ridiculous, and keep trying to do their job without complaint, but that just means the problems are masked not eliminated. So you have major structural problems, but everyone who was willing to give a damn or even point them out is gone. At best the company is running significantly below the efficiency it should be, and that alone can be enough to mean its eventual collapse, when forced to compete with a competitor without those issues. Heck the main reason I'm at least looking at other jobs is to find a company that actually really believes in people, not processes.

Anti-social management

[Tablizer]

Why don't they just ASK our opinions on office flow and harmony (or lack of) instead of buy expensive buggy crapware to do it?

Re:Anti-social management

[Yvan256]

That's like those ad companies that try to figure out what our interests are instead of directly asking us to check a few boxes on a form.

Re: Anti-social management

[Tablizer]

Many people are happy to say what they think about general org practices that need some rework.

it also works in reverse

[epine]

No intelligence here.

The mindlessness of this technology is it's number one selling point.

As rumour goes around (you're soaking in it), dutiful employees will onboard yet another reason to paint within arbitrary and demeaning corporate lines like good passionless drones (have I flunked the test?)

Here is a rather chilling passage from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). ... For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.

However, who would dare to be the first to stop? ... After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on — six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn't stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly — but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?

The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter ...

Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!

The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

"Don't ever be the first to stop applauding."

Re: it also works in reverse

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked at a startup with a "presenteeism" culture. This is the exact sort of toxic nonsense that ultimately motivated me to quit.

Re:it also works in reverse

[gaspyy]

Having spent my childhood under a similar dictatorship, you stopped clapping only when instructed to do so by the highest party member in the room. That's how it worked.

Guess I had better change my signature

[Steve1952]

What this software really means is that I, like many other employees, am going to have to change my signature.

--

Ima Embezzler, 123 Ihatemyjob Street, Killmy Coworkers, California

Once known, becomes completely useless

[gweihir]

People will just use other channels for that type of communication. And there is also a serious risk: Many people will not communicate needed information for fear to be caught by this. In the ultimate consequence this can do much more damage than it helps.

Re: Once known, becomes completely useless

[gweihir]

Hahahahaha, you are funny. And stupid (ell, what do you expect from an AC...). Nothing goes faster through the grapevine than people getting fired for unclear or suspicious reasons. And unlike you I actually have evidence of the problem I describe happening. No, I cannot talk about it, I an under NDA.

Re:Bezz Led

[gweihir]

As the bosses will do analyses like "Which are the 1% I should fire", the matching algorithm (no AI in there) will resort to partial syntactic matches when it cannot fulfill the quota otherwise. Even a name with suspicious parts will get you fired then.

Not necessarily bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, I'm supposed to have a knee-jerk reaction that this is bad and innocent people will get in trouble, yada yada yada... but I don't. There's far too much fear mongering here that Slashdot is almost unreadable these days. It could be an interesting idea in linguistics and data mining to identify potential workplace threats and troubled workers. There shouldn't be an expectation of privacy in workplace emails. If you want that, use a private account to discuss things.

Whether this is good or bad comes down to how you react to an alert. If this is used to fire or penalize employees who are troubled, it will only exacerbate real problems. Likewise, a culture of big brother won't develop any kind of trust in the workplace and will lower morale and productivity. This also shouldn't be used to look for crimes like theft and embezzlement because those are best dealt with through good inventory, record keeping, and frequent audits. For genuinely troubled employees, however, this might actually be useful if it leads to a confidential meeting with a third party or ombudsman who tries to help the employee. If it's used to actually help troubled employers who might not reach out for help on their own, it could actually help people while protecting the company. If used properly, it's a good thing.

Sadly, the tinfoil hat crowd that dominates this site will ensure that no productive or positive discussion of this occurs here. That's unfortunate because it could actually help people and it's better than actual people snooping on emails. It's also interesting how such a system might be able to detect levels of stress in employees and the techniques that might be used. Sadly, I highly doubt any such discussion will take place in this able reticle thanks to the paranoid delusional people here.

Re: Not necessarily bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother trying to write an interesting comment that might spur on discussion when it's going to quickly be hit with a -1? This system isn't necessarily going to be used for evil purposes and the heuristics might have a lot of interesting applications. Personal assistants like Cortana and Siri might be able to detect a person's mood and interact with the person accordingly, which is actually useful. It's also a hell of a lot more interesting than the paranoid fear mongering in most of these comments.

Slashdot is a cesspool of hypocrisy. Users don't like systems that censor speech and promote conformity, yet moderation does exactly that. If you post a dissenting view, especially as an AC, you're likely to rapidly be hit with a -1 regardless of the actual merits of your post. Those who participate fully and log in also get karma feedback, which influences their ability to moderate. It promotes groupthink, which is one of the reasons I refuse to fully participate and stick to being an AC. Moderation is pretty useless to distinguish good posts from bad ones and metamoderation is broken. Too many blatantly racist trolls get modded up while good posts get modded down, so clearly bad moderators aren't getting filtered out. However, as a system to promote groupthink, moderation actually functions quite effectively.

Sadly, the nerds who would have discussed other applications of this system and how it works have long since departed Slashdot. It's been taken over by the tinfoil hat crowd. Conform to the paranoia or be censored. Resistance is futile.

Re:Not necessarily bad

[Dogtanian]

It could be an interesting idea in linguistics and data mining to identify potential workplace threats and troubled workers.

Being an "interesting" idea from an intellectual point of view says absolutely *nothing* about whether it's a good idea or not.

There shouldn't be an expectation of privacy in workplace emails. If you want that, use a private account to discuss things.

Okay; the fact you're expressing that pat response here suggests that you don't understand (or weren't paying attention to) the difference between this and the typical (straightforward) "employers are reading my workplace email" thread. I actually wonder whether you even got the point of the story at all.

This isn't spying on people directly expressing hostile or subversive thoughts against the company, this is using it on (potentially) superficially work-related and neutral email content to determine the underlying psychological attitude of the employee.

Given that the employee is probably *required* to use email in this manner as part of their job, and given that this isn't something they're likely to be consciously doing (else they'd avoid doing it, duh) it's not as if they have a choice in the matter.

Whether this is good or bad comes down to how you react to an alert.

The issue here- and the reason most people quite rightly expressed the (supposedly) "kneejerk" reaction you dismiss- is that they already know based on past experience how large corporations or similar entities- i.e. the people likely to be buying this technology- will probably use this sort of power.

For genuinely troubled employees, however, this might actually be useful if it leads to a confidential meeting with a third party or ombudsman who tries to help the employee.

Yeah, because large US-style corporations are well-known for protecting employees with problems and won't simply use this as an early warning on someone they can get rid of before they become a problem. Or might not have, but why take the chance?

I saw the example in the story. A nice, touchy-feely way to justify an intrusive technology, but let's get real here.

If it's used to actually help troubled employers who might not reach out for help on their own, it could actually help people while protecting the company. If used properly, it's a good thing.

The question is, how likely to you think it is to be used "properly" in your sense of the word?

Your problem is that you seem to view the technology in a purely abstract sense- i.e. one that could theoretically be used for good or bad. Well, theoretically it could be, yes.

However, your so-called "tinfoil hat crowd" knows damn well that such technologies don't exist in isolation, know what type of people it's been designed for, and the type of people and organisations it's likely to be sold to. Based on past experience, it's not unreasonable to draw such conclusions on how it's likely to be used.

So, you can keep expressing your (repeated) dismissal of its critics as "paranoid delusional", but that doesn't make your counter-argument any stronger.

Re: Not necessarily bad

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, a lot of what you're talking about wrt the scoring system is a side effect of scoring in general. People will look for things to game, and gaming for a high score to get your comments higher visibility could be understood by some to be "winning" socially. Many people will use whatever metric they can to make themselves feel socially valuable, which is why any technology that hopes to facilitate meaningful commentary *will not use numbers in meaningful ways*. Reddit, Slashdot, Stack Overflow, Imgur, Hacker News, etc all suffer from this. Slashdot doubly so since you can't delete your account (which is largely why I remain anonymous). For Slashdot itself, there's a strange culture against anonymous commenting, as if revealing one's pseudonym or name adds any credibility or weight to a comment. All it does is open yourself up to doxxing or harassment. So yeah, very hypocritical indeed.

I disagree with your main comment. The technology itself is neutral, sure, but in the hands of a corporation you can guarantee it'll be used in the most oppressive or disruptive way. Outspoken or controversial employees (especially ones who know they've been running double books or something, for example) will be targeted first, and their dismissal will not be explained. That's to create an air of fear in the workplace and to try and instill a specific type of behavior. The time where corporations just wanted to make a good product they could stand behind and be paid a fair amount is gone. They're faceless organizations that fully understand their place in society and want to use it to gain as much money and political influence as possible. It's the endgame of capitalism.

Re: Not necessarily bad

[Sperbels]

Those who participate fully and log in also get karma feedback, which influences their ability to moderate. It promotes groupthink, which is one of the reasons I refuse to fully participate and stick to being an AC.

Have you checked a mirror lately, because I'm pretty sure you have a tinfoil hat on too.

Wow!

[DaMattster]

This re-affirms my decision to leave corporate America. I drive a truck now and thank the lord because shit like this pisses me off. I don't like our corporate overlords.

Re:Wow!

[GuB-42]

I hope it is your own truck. Because otherwise, you will be tracked even more than in the office. GPS tracking devices are becoming the norm and they are probably considering microphones and cameras too.

Is there a market for an email scrubber then?

[shoor]

If this gets to be a problem, maybe someone should write a program that will 'scrub' your email before you post it, Flag, remove, or replace those subconscious red flags that you put in.

I work in HR analytics, would never install

[Anonymous Coward]

I get that many clueless HR departments would install this, but those with actual (competent) analytics teams would avoid this or implement it very carefully. It is a huge can of worms with minimal benefit. Maybe you correctly flag a few risky people, but you equally risk false flags with expensive legal ramifications. Not only that, but you suddenly have a massive trove of data that an upset employee could use against you to potentially show a pattern of practice in a discrimination case, legit or not. Even the kindest, least discriminatory employer has a few employees who are picked on by others. Way too easy for this tool to get turned right around on the employer and HR departments are risk averse.

Business Email Etiquette 101:

[TigerPlish]

1. Do not, under any circumstance, say anything in email that you wouldn't say to your boss' face.

2. See #1.

It's not rocket science, people. Most IT depts I've been in have language in the "IT Policy" newbs must sign saying something like "All communications may be monitored bla bla bla"

Legal dept will advise them differently

[nehumanuscrede]

This stuff falls into pseudo-science much like a polygraph does. The first time they fire someone based on what amounts to ' digital profiling ' it will likely be quite a costly mistake.

Besides, there is nothing in my contract that states I have to like my job. I just have to do it.

I would think that if folks were not afraid of the fallout, any given company would find that a rather significant percentage of their workforce thinks less than positive thoughts about their job in general.

Re:Legal dept will advise them differently

[NormalVisual]

This stuff falls into pseudo-science much like a polygraph does.

Agree 100%. I was tasked to implement a sentiment scoring feature like this in a corporate monitoring/surveillance product a couple of years back, intended to evaluate IMs, emails, etc. for potential leaks/corporate espionage/other bad stuff. I told them that we didn't have the time or in-house expertise to do it ourselves, and every single one of the commercially available libraries that I evaluated turned out to be snake oil.

I bitch and whine where the bosses see and hear me

[raymorris]

I bitch about work in the company's chat rooms. I know my boss, and his boss, can see my messages. That doesn't stop me from not-so-subtly complaining about corporate bureacracy.

Currently, humans read my communications and make subjective judgement calls based on which snippets of my conversation they might have noticed. Hopefully they think "Ray is highly motivated to improve our most problemtic processes". :)

The the only difference a system like this would make for me would be that the interpretation would be more objective and based on a larger sample of my communications.

This plays right into Google's hand...

[berchca]

In the near future, employees will protecting themselves from false (or otherwise) accusations by never personally getting involved in their own email correspondence.

http://www.wired.com/2015/11/google-is-using-ai-to-create-automatic-replies-in-gmail/

Re:positive feedback loop

[ShaunC]

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Re: Assume all corporate mail is read by someone..

[nehumanuscrede]

... and write accordingly. I do it for as long I can remember.

Anyway... who in their right mind would write 'I loathe this job' in a corporate mail?

* * * *

Those who do not grovel or worship those in charge for the opportunity to work for them. Those whose skills could transfer to any number of companies if push came to shove.

These are your " go-to " people. They get shit done. Quickly and efficiently. They do not deal with stupidity or bureaucracy well. Give them a task, however, and it gets done.

You could fire them, but then you're left with the special snowflakes all of which rely on the " answer guy " you just fired to get things done.

Once your top talent is gone, how does this reflect overall on the manager in charge going forward when shit no longer gets done like it used to. Pretty soon guess whose head is on the chopping block ?

All because X doesn't hide their thoughts about how they feel about the company in general ?

Choose wisely.

based on value to company, that puts them in XS

[swschrad]

that ought to winnow out the bosses with silly ideas.

hahahahah ha haha oh jeez, my side hurts....

Re:based on value to company, that puts them in XS

[gweihir]

Initially, yes. Then they will do a whitelist of all the bosses emails. You know like all the security rules do not apply to people high enough in the hierarchy.

Figures.

[gruntspeak]

Minority TPS Report.

How do you know whether it works?

[purplie]

This is the best kind of software: one that gives an opaque authoritative answer that users are likely to just take on faith. Cheap; no quality control necessary.

The More That You Lie And Cheat, The More Paranoid

[broward]

you become, from worrying about retribution.

you can see the trend clearly in the government and large corporations.

Re:I bitch and whine where the bosses see and hear

[gweihir]

Nobody that is actually critical is threatened by this. I would not be either. But it is important to also provide reasonable working conditions to the average worker, or social peace will be threatened. And they will not know how to deal with this and clamp up in fear. I have seen it happening in a similar situation.

I see no problem with this!

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

I trust The Computer! The Computer is my friend! I love The Computer!

I've always thought that saying anything negative about my company, co-workers, etc, using company resources is a "violation" of my "professional ethics" anyway. When I'm on a job, I see myself as a professional IT worker, and don't discuss my personal feelings about anything at all via corporate email. My feelings towards the corp have little to do with system uptime, resolving hardware issues, etc. My feelings might be useful if I'm tasked with pinning down some "power user" to install some software on their PC if their known to be "combative towards IT", but even then I know how to professionally phrase my potential issues. If your highly disgruntled at your job, you should probably be making plans to move on anyway and shouldn't need some AI to tell you so.

Corp email is owned by said corp. Nothing you do or say using the corp's time or infrastructure is private. This isn't something new, its always been this way. What annoys me even more is that the CIA is considering a database search that adds to a tally then does some percentage calculations an AI. Really? What could be boiled down to a few search lines, simple addition, and maybe a SQL table of "key words" is an AI?

Re:I see no problem with this!

[Frederic54]

> I trust The Computer! The Computer is my friend! I love The Computer!

Oh yeah the good old RPG Paranoïa, loved this :)

Completely Irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA.
This is not about being rude or stupid in email. This is digital "micro-tells" - The idea that people give away their emotional state by subconscious actions that are not visible to the untrained eye. Word choice, sentence construction, word count, punctuation, time of day that the message is sent, time elapsed between receiving a message and responding, etc.

Its total bullshit (just as real-life micro-tells are total bullshit) and the result is going to be arbitrary persecution of people singled out by what amounts to a random number generator.

I may send this to a coworker soon

[davidwr]

"Joe, I'm really worried about my new puppy. I think he's smarter than his mom. I'm not sure if he's stealing food while she's around or if he's embezzling it behind her back.

I don't think my kid's too happy that I made him get a job this summer. Last week I heard him say I loathe this job. I'm not sure if he's angry at me or angry at the fact that it's a minimum-wage job, but he seems pretty pissed off. Thankfully, he vents his stress at the local school, which is a lot better than going postal."

Let's see if the automated email processor can parse that load of fiction correctly.

I have had similar access. yes, you can read minds

[EmperorOfCanada]

Some people's emails are 100% clear where they are planning malfeasance. Others are talking with their doctor about their OCD medicine not working. But the best are where the same person will tell two or more people about the same situation but will tell it entirely differently. They will tell their boss one thing their underlings another, a co-manager another, and possibly a co-conspirator another thing again.

It was my experience that the people who told the same "fact" multiple different ways were the most damaging to the company.

So, while this system might be able to spot people clearly up to no good, I hope they use the ML stuff to correlate damage to certain behaviours. For instance micromanagement would easily be detectable in emails and is a great way to chase away some of the top talent. I would say that detecting that would be far better than detecting some employees who are looking for a new job. If anything a bunch of underlings continuously looking for new jobs would say more about their manager than about them as individuals.

A secretary pilfering some money out of petty cash might cost the company a tiny amount like $100,000 per year. Losing a single top programmer to micromanagement could cost the company millions or more. Losing a stream of top programmers could literally cost the company everything.

I think the point of this kinda big data tech

[rsilvergun]

is that you can take _everything_ you'd ever said to your bosses face and analyze it for trends. If you're already looking for reasons to fire people for performance here's another.

Re:I think the point of this kinda big data tech

[TigerPlish]

It's almost like... like they don't want employees at all.

The point of this

[axewolf]

The point of this is more to steer productivity as to prevent sabotage.
It's a constant whip cracking over the heads of the spineless and gullible.

"Anti-sabotage" is only an excuse really.

Re: Bezz Led

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Slashdot sucks because, instead of discussing technology, it's a bunch of paranoid delusional tinfoil hat nutjobs.

If you want my delusions... you'll have to pry them from my cold, dead mind.

Double-plus-good :)))

[matbury]

This is double-plus-good news! I'm sure that the algorithm performs wonderfully for all people under all conditions and never misunderstands the communicative intentions of the email writers when it's blatantly obvious to the recipient and other human readers. Computers can definitely understand pragmatic human communication.

Self censorship, Soviet style

[Rexdude]

All this will result in is people being more careful about how they word their emails. Even now it is an incredibly stupid thing to rant on corporate email - it gets recorded for posterity and can be used against you at appraisal time, or get you fired.

Just last week...

[Hylandr]

We had another article where another federal agency was looking for information much like this:

https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

Minority report

[Chrisq]

So you can sack the employees before they do anything wrong

Re:Thank god for the EU

[Chrisq]

In the EU it's pretty much always illegal to read your employees' emails.

Yes, we're so lucky in the UK to be part of an organisation that protect employees .... Oh wait!

Clippy says...

[RuffMasterD]

Hi! It looks like you are angry. Perhaps you are in a fragile state of mind and would like to kill everybody. Would you like some assistance with that? Oh, by the way, I read that your colleagues hate you, your boss is about to fire you, your girlfriend is sleeping with your best friend, and your parents never wanted you.

Corporate thinking at its finest

[skovnymfe]

Let's combat the symptom, not the cause. If people are unhappy with their work conditions, we must expunge them before they become a nuisance. Get back to work you drones.

How about this Secret Trick

[cellocgw]

Assuming y'all are stuck w/ Outlook at work, set your default to Rich Text. Then write a few lines of horrificness into your signature, and format them as white text.

Nobody but the algorithm will see it.

Yes, yes, I know that everyone who reads your mail as plaintext will too. It's just a dang joke, 'mkay?

Re: Bezz Led

[gweihir]

The idiot here is you. You have no clue what "AI" today can and cannot do. Your statements are pure fantasy.

No problem

[joe_frisch]

This doesn't bother me at all. I'm sure that my employer would see that I have the complete confidence in management and enthusiasm for our mission.

Re:positive feedback loop

[Mikkeles]

... and the meetings will continue to find out why the work isn't getting done.

Re:Here is another idea

[Sperbels]

That costs more. Why make workers happy, when you can higher a robot fire the workers that are most unhappy and drag down the happiness average.

Related Uses

[bobmajdakjr]

I would love to see this run against the Linux mailing lists to see its assessment of Torvalds. That would have to be comedy gold.