Will we ever trust robots?

DAVID VINTINER

“A lot of companies that do this kind of thing end up doing it in a way that’s kind of crappy for the people who get hired,” Hashme told me. Such companies often outsource important HR activities to untrustworthy partners abroad or lose workers’ trust with poor incentive programs, he said, adding: “With a more experienced and better-led team, and a lot more transparency around the whole system, I expect we’ll be able to do a much better job.” .”

It is worth revealing the nature of Hashme’s departure from Scale AI, where he was hired in 2017 as the 14th employee. According to reports, in May 2019 court documentsScale noticed that someone had repeatedly withdrawn unauthorized payments of $140 and transferred them to multiple PayPal accounts. The company contacted the FBI. Over five months, about $56,000 was taken from the company. The investigation revealed that Hashme, who was 26 years old at the time, was behind the withdrawal, and in October of that year he pleaded guilty to one count of internet fraud. Before the sentencing, Alexandr Wang, the now billionaire founder and CEO of Scale AI, wrote a letter to the judge in support of Hashme, as did 13 other current or former Scale employees. “I believe that Shariq is sincerely remorseful for his crime and I have no reason to believe that he will ever do something similar again,” Wang wrote, adding that the company would not have wanted the culprit prosecuted if it had known that it was Hashme.

Hashme lost his job, his stock options and Scale’s sponsorship of his green card application. Before leaving, Scale offered him a $10,000 severance package, which he declined, Wang’s letter said. Hashme paid the money back in 2019, and in February 2020 he was sentenced to three months in federal prison, which he served. Wang is now the primary investor in Prosper Robotics, alongside Ben Mann (co-founder of Anthropic), Simon Last (co-founder of Notion) and Deb Olaosebikan (co-founder and CEO of Kepler Computing).

“When I was younger, I had a big error in judgment. I faced some personal challenges and I was stealing from my employer. The consequences and realization of what I did was a shock and led to a lot of soul-searching,” Hashme wrote in an email in response to questions about the crime. At Prosper, he wrote, “we take reliability as our highest aspiration.”

There are some real advantages to being able to control robots remotely, but the idea of ​​large-scale robotic teleoperation of overseas workers, even if it takes years to be effective, would be nothing short of a seismic shift for work. This would present the possibility that even highly localized physical work that we think of as immune to being moved abroad—cleaning hotel rooms or caring for hospital patients—could one day be performed by workers abroad. It also seems antithetical to the very idea of ​​a reliable robot, since the machine’s efficiency would be inextricably linked to a faceless worker in another country, most likely receiving a miserable wage.

Hashme has talked about using some of Prosper’s profits to make direct payments to people whose jobs have been affected or replaced by Alfies, but has no details on how that would work. He’s also still pondering questions about who or what Prospero’s customers should trust when they let his robot into their home.

“We don’t want you to have that much faith in the company or the people the company employs,” he says. “We’d rather you trust a device, and the device is a robot, and the robot makes sure the company doesn’t do something it shouldn’t do.”

He admits that the first version of Alfie is unlikely to meet his highest aspirations, but remains adamant that the robot can be useful to society and people, if only they can trust it.