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Part I: The Question

A delivery rider is offered an order, accepts it within the few seconds the application allows, and is rated on the outcome. A warehouse worker's handheld scanner records each pick and each pause. An applicant answers recorded interview questions that no person watches before a score is produced. A claims adjuster opens a queue that an agent has sorted and paced. In each case some of the work that a manager used to do is now done, or shaped, by a system. This part asks the question the rest of the book answers: when artificial intelligence takes over parts of the manager's work, who is the boss, and who answers for what happens to the person being managed?

The question is not new in form. Managers have measured work for more than a century, and every generation of measurement has raised the same arguments about control, fairness and productivity. What is new is the reach, the speed and the opacity of the measurement, and the fact that the system can now act on what it measures: assign the next task, adjust the schedule, flag the worker, recommend the dismissal. In the other direction, people are now asked to manage software agents, and the language of management is being applied to them. Both movements are observable today, and both need the same vocabulary before they can be judged.

Chapters in this part:

  • Chapter 1, Introduction: Who Is the Boss?, sets out the question, the thesis the book tests, what would show the thesis to be wrong, and how the book builds on the conclusions of the six earlier volumes of the series.
  • Chapter 2, What a Manager Does: Five Management Functions and Who Performs Them, divides management into five functions, M1 Direction, M2 Evaluation, M3 Consequence, M4 Development and M5 Care, and shows that a manager's job is a bundle of these that can be separated and delegated one by one.
  • Chapter 3, From Scientific Management to Algorithmic Management: A Century of Managing by Measurement, traces the line from time-and-motion study through call-centre metrics to platform dispatch, so that the reader can tell what is genuinely new about the AI boss and what is an old argument in new equipment.
  • Chapter 4, The AI Boss Defined: Management Functions, Degrees of Delegation and Accountability, joins the functions to the series' autonomy levels, here called degrees of delegation, and to the usage modes, and states the rule the rest of the book applies: Level 4 Autonomous is never used for M3 Consequence.

Management functions in this part. Part I defines all five functions and does not yet judge any of them. It establishes the distinction on which the book's argument rests: the functions that assign and pace work (M1 Direction) differ in kind from the functions that carry consequences for a person (M3 Consequence), and both differ from the functions that build people up and look after them (M4 Development and M5 Care), which are the easiest to neglect when the measurable functions are automated.

The thread from the series. AI Threat asked whether the dystopias of science fiction are coming true, and found that the quiet harms to the mind, to work and to organisations deserve attention before the loud ones; it introduced the delegation register for what people hand over to machines (AI Threat, Chapter 26). The Transformed Security Architect concluded that a role is transformed rather than abolished when accountable human judgement remains its scarce part, and that a person who conducts an AI team remains the accountable verifier of what it proposes. This part takes both conclusions into the domain where they matter most for most working people: being managed.

What you will learn in this part:

  • The five management functions and why separating them is the first step to governing the AI boss
  • What a century of managing by measurement teaches about what algorithmic management adds
  • How degrees of delegation, usage modes and accountability fit together into one definition
  • The thesis the book tests, and the evidence that would refute it

The chapters in Part I are the frame. Part II turns from definitions to the places where the AI boss is already at work.