david bintiner
“A lot of companies that do things like that end up doing it in a way that’s kind of terrible for the people who are employed,” Hashim told me. Such companies often outsource critical HR functions to unreliable partners overseas or lose employee trust through poor incentive programs, he said, adding, We look forward to seeing even greater transparency across the team and the system as a whole.” You will be able to do a better job. ”
It’s worth clarifying how Hashme left Scale AI in 2017 as its 14th employee. According to court documents, in May 2019, Mr. Scales noticed someone repeatedly withdrawing fraudulent payments of $140 and sending them to multiple PayPal accounts. The company contacted the FBI. Approximately $56,000 was stolen from the company over a five-month period. An investigation revealed that Hashmeh, then 26, was involved in the withdrawal, and he pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in October of the same year. Prior to sentencing, Scale AI founder and CEO Alexander Wang, along with 13 other current or former employees of Scale AI, announced that wrote a letter to the judge in support of Mr. “I believe that Mr. Shariq is truly remorseful for his crimes. There is no reason to believe that he would do anything like this again,” Wang wrote, adding that if the company knew that Mr. Hashmeh was He said that if he had done so, he would not have wanted to prosecute the wrongdoers. .
Hashme lost his job, stock options, and Scale’s sponsorship of his green card application. According to Wang’s letter, Scale offered him a $10,000 severance package before leaving the company, which he declined. Hashme repaid the money in 2019 and was sentenced to three months in federal prison in February 2020, which he served. Mr. Wang is currently a major investor in Prosper Robotics, along with Ben Mann (co-founder of Anthropic), Simon Last (co-founder of Notion), and Debo Olaosebikan (co-founder and CEO of Kepler Computing).
“When I was younger, I made a huge lapse in judgment. I was facing some personal challenges and stole money from my employer. “The realization was shocking and caused me to do a lot of self-examination,” Hashme wrote in an email in response to questions about the crime. At Prosper, “reliability is our number one goal,” he wrote.
While there are some real benefits to being able to remotely control robots, the idea of large-scale robot remote control by overseas workers is a seismic shift for labor, even if it takes years to take effect. It couldn’t be any other way. It raises the possibility that even highly localized manual labor that we perceive as unaffected by offshoring, such as cleaning hotel rooms or caring for hospitalized patients, may one day be performed by overseas workers. will be presented. The machine’s effectiveness is also inextricably tied to faceless workers in other countries who are likely to receive meager wages, making it antithetical to the very idea of a trustworthy robot. I can also see it.
Hashme talked about using a portion of Prosper’s profits to make direct payments to people whose jobs have been affected or replaced by Alfie, but provided no further details on how that would work. I haven’t talked about it. He’s also still weighing the question of who or what Prosper’s customers should trust when letting robots into their homes.
“We don’t want people to have as much trust in their companies and the people they hire,” he says. “I would rather you trust your device. It’s a robot, and the robot is monitoring the company to make sure it doesn’t do anything it shouldn’t.”
He admits that the first version of Alfie likely won’t live up to his highest aspirations, but the idea that robots can be useful to society and people changes if they can be trusted. No.