Artificial Intelligence – Key Issues and Considerations – I

Although the next round of AI’s technological progress will be in the background for a while, there’s no getting away from this topic.  It’s cheek-to-jowl with jobs and the economy, and we know little more about what effect it will ultimately have than we knew about that of cars when Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler were tinkering with contraptions.  I intend to provide only the most important concerns and leave off the seemingly endless pieces speculating on whether AI will be a boon to or the end of humanity, for the same reasons baseball writer Bill James said about another issue decades ago: “1.  I don’t know, and 2.  You don’t know, either.”  This is the first of at least three such consecutive posts.

Oldest, but still within the month, is “8 Questions About Using AI Responsibly, Answered” (Tsedal Neeley, Harvard Business Review, May 9^th).  After “How should I prepare to introduce AI at my organization?” (“Ensure that everyone has a basic understanding of how digital systems work…  make sure your organization is prepared for continuous adaptation and change… build AI into your operating model”), we got “How can we ensure transparency in how AI makes decisions?” (“Recognize that AI Is invisible and inscrutable and be transparent in presenting and using AI systems… prioritize explanation as a central design goal”), “How can we erect guardrails around LLMs [large language models] so that their responses are true and consistent with the brand image we want to project?” (“Tailor data for appropriate outputs… document data”), “How can we ensure that the dataset we use to train AI models is representative and doesn’t include harmful biases?” (“consider the trade-offs you make…” get “diverse teams” to “collect and produce the data used to train models”), “What are the potential risks of data privacy violations with AI?” (follow the seven Privacy by Design principles), “How can we encourage employees to use AI for productivity purposes and not simply to take shortcuts?” (“evaluate whether AI’s strengths match up to a task and proceed accordingly”), “How worried should we be that AI will replace jobs?” (not across the board), and “How can my organization ensure that the AI we develop or use won’t harm individuals or groups or violate human rights?” (“Slow down and document AI development… establish and protect AI ethics watchdogs… watch where regulation is headed”).  A worthwhile primer.

Four days later, The Economist covered the second-to-last point above in “Your new colleague; Artificial intelligence is about to turn the economy upside down.  Right?”  This article cited a Goldman Sachs paper projecting that “in a best-case scenario generative AI could add about $430 billion to annual global enterprise-software revenues” as 1.1 billion world office workers could require just under $400 each.  Yet it could be slow, considering examples such as a 90-year lag between automating technology and job decimation of telephone operators and the continuing presence of subway-train drivers and traffic police.  Additionally, “it is even possible that the AI economy could become less productive,” as may be the case with smartphones and remote work and certainly was, for a long time, with personal computers. 

Here’s a foundation for something going wrong: “AI tools being used by police who ‘do not understand how these technologies work’: Study” (Chris Eberhart, Fox News, May 15^th).  Respondents were “not familiar with AI, or with the limitations of AI technologies,” although they liked having this capability.  Perhaps a basic course of some sort should be required.

A fine semi-philosophical question hit the press in “Is It Too Late to Regulate A.I., or Too Soon?” (Timothy B. Lee, Slate, May 18^th).  It started with an account of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s May 16^th “appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee” in which the corporate leader asked for licensing “any effort above a certain scale of capabilities, and could take that license away and ensure compliance with safety standards,” with special concern with systems that could “self-replicate and self-exfiltrate into the wild.”  Such a system is being built in Europe.  Either could call for somewhere between scrutiny and a ban on incremental improvements to existing releases, such as ChatGPT4, and could greatly delay availability of future ones.  In the meantime, regulating bodies would need to understand the current issues and technical state, which could also take a while.  No, it’s not too late, but if governments, not noted for being nimble, cannot keep up, it will be too soon.

After all these high-level AI concerns, how about some pithy advice on how to use it?  We got that in “On Tech A.I.: Get the best from ChatGPT with these golden prompts” (Brian X. Chen, The New York Times, May 25^th).  Suggestions here are geared also to Bing, from Microsoft, and Bard, a Google product.  First is that “if you’re concerned about privacy, leave out personal details like your name and where you work,” as it could be shared, omit “trade secrets or sensitive information,” and to be aware that it may have “hallucinations,” as the tools “can make things up” “while trying to predict patterns from their vast training data,” some of which is “wrong.”  From there, use prompts starting with “act as if” continuing with the role you want the software to play and “tell me what else you need to do this.”  Instead of starting fresh, “keep several threads of conversations open and add to them over time.” 

More next week, as this area continues to evolve.

A Strange but Telling Jobs Report: 339,000 Net New, Latent Demand Up Over a Million

The headline piece of this morning's Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was how the number of nonfarm payroll jobs destroyed the estimates.  I saw three of those, ranging from 180,000 to 193,000, and it came in at 339,000.  Right behind that, though, was a 0.3% jump in seasonally adjusted unemployment, from 3.4% to 3.7%, matched by the same change to the unadjusted variety, which went from 3.1% to 3.4%.

How could unemployment and jobs both go up so much?  Another figure held the answer.  The count of people reporting they did not want to work fell from 95,077,000 to 93,912,000 – over a million in one month. 

Otherwise, the number employed dropped 73,000 to 161,002,000, not much but not a gain, and the two measures of the likelihood of people working or being one step away, the employment-population ratio and the labor force participation rate, lost 0.1% and broke even respectively to reach 60.3% and 62.6%.  The count of those officially jobless for 27 weeks or longer stayed at 1.2 million, but the number of those working part-time for economic reasons, or keeping such limited work while looking thus far unsuccessfully for the full-time variety, matched May’s 200,000 loss and is now at 3.7 million.

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the statistic showing how many additional positions could be quickly filled if all knew they would be easy to get, gained over a million, as follows:

 

 Along with the half-million gain in the AJSN’s share of those unemployed was almost as much from those wanting work but not looking for it in the previous year.  Otherwise, the largest contributions were from people temporarily unavailable and in school or training.  The share of the AJSN from unemployment gained 1.3% to 31.3%. 

The most informative comparison was with the year before.  Although there were 2.4 million more Americans working in May 2023 than in May 2022, latent demand was almost identical.  The AJSN for both rounded to 16.4 million, and the largest difference in any of the categories above was less than 180,000.  The count of those in the armed services, institutionalized, and off the grid fell 970,000, meaning real gains for other statuses.  All of that means we have completely absorbed the 2.4 million jobs, without any decrease in how many people want to work.  And our population, even including children, retirees, and 570,000 more claiming no interest in employment, increased less than that.

Overall, what’s happening?  We are adding many jobs and they are being filled.  While masses of baby boomers are turning 65, they are hardly moving uniformly from employment to not wanting that.  There were plenty of Americans who, in the past month, joined more ambitious categories but did not find work.  Wait until next month for them – for most, it won’t take much longer.  The United States job market is getting more and more robust, and this edition underscored how deep our pool of potential employees actually is.  Accordingly, the turtle took another solid step forward. 

Hustling: On the Side, Not on Mondays, Not at All, and Twice Over

Of its meanings, different ones for “hustling” have been most prominent at different times.  First it denoted moving quickly and effectively.  In the 1970s, it meant mostly winning bets by concealing skill.  Soon thereafter, helped by the title of a Gail Sheehy book, it referred to prostitution.  Since then, it has gone back somewhat to its original meaning, but referring to employment in various ways.  Here are three, and how they pertain to today’s work environments.

On December 30^th in the Motley Fool’s Ascent, Maurie Backman told us and asked us “82% of People With a Side Hustle Got One Due to Inflation.  Should You Keep Yours if Inflation Cools Off?”  I doubt it was anything like 82% – employed people have been doing other things for money long before they called it “moonlighting,” and most will continue without regard to clearly temporary financial pinches.  As Robert Townsend told us in 1970’s classic Up the Organization, “like sleeping around, it scatters energy… If there’s a lot of it going on, it may be a sign that the system has defeated the people again.  If they can’t release their spare energies toward your goals, they’ll moonlight for somebody who doesn’t have job descriptions and policy manuals.”  Still pertinent, but in different ways – per Backman, “having an extra source of income can help you pad your savings and still have money coming in if you get laid off in a recession” – and even though a recession seems remote, such propositions can be valuable, emotionally as well as financially.

“Should you hide your side hustle from your employer?  Here’s what to consider” (Gili Malinsky, cnbc.com, December 20^th) addressed another ancient problem.  The author cited a “side hustle expert,” who recommended researching official company policies, checking with an “employment lawyer,” and disclosing it if all is clear.  I had such a venture, completely unrelated to my work responsibilities, which consumed 20 to 25 hours a week, during most of my corporate career, was careful to, per Malinsky, “not to use company equipment or company time” for it, and never had to discuss it.  It worked – and so did I, well enough to get top performance reviews.

Selective non-hustling was the subject of “Americans take a break from the weekend on ‘bare minimum Mondays’” (Kristen Altus, Fox Business, March 6^th).  Unlike moonlighting, this “latest workplace trend receiving more and more support from the U.S. labor force” does not meet with my approval.  How hard to work is a personal employee decision, but cordoning off times in advance when you will not, would fully justify in this case companies giving 10% pay cuts (half pay for Mondays).  People can pace themselves during the week, but feeling “overworked and underpaid” is not reason by itself, and may result in no job at all.  This style means a change in working practices and expectations, and is more than anything else a human resources problem.

How about doing that every day?  Jing Pan, writing in MoneyWise, saw that “US productivity is stalling out and employees are less willing to ‘engage in hustle culture,’ as 1 in 5 Americans admit to doing the ‘bare minimum’ at work” (January 27^th).  The author said that “there’s no doubt employees across the country have been pulling back at work.”  Again a worker choice, at least partially from companies unwilling to assess qualitative and quantitative employee differences, and another indicator of structural issues.

And now, the ultimate hustle, about which Alison Green asked, in Slate on February 20^th, “What’s Really So Wrong About Secretly Working Two Full-Time Jobs at Once?”  Now called being “overemployed,” this is getting more and more common, made possible by remote work and aided by excessive nonjudgmentalism and temporally undemanding responsibilities.  Here we must make ethical choices, as, barring an explicit policy against it, the “don’t ask – don’t tell” policy above is perfectly moral, but lying about it is not.  Per this piece, those overemployed vary in their approaches and in some ways of negotiating conflicts between the positions, ranging from being upfront to saying anything they think they can get away with.  Two salient comments from Green are  “Managers have an instinctive horror at the thought of someone secretly working a second job during their work hours for the first, but if they can’t point to any problems resulting from it… maybe it’s time to rethink that,” and “employers should ask themselves what would drive someone to lie about having multiple jobs… for years now, employers have been understaffing and expecting employees to do the work of multiple roles for no increase in pay.  Perhaps its inevitable that some of them have decided that if they’re going to be overworked, they’re going to benefit from it.”

So, what will “hustling” mean in 2035?  If it pertains to jobs and the economy, expect me, if I’m still here, to cover it. 

Five Big Ideas on Jobs, the Economy, and the Nation

As staggering as the beginning of artificial intelligence’s ascent has been, it is not the only area where technology or public policy could greatly transform our country.  Here is a group of them.

First and oldest is “Do Brain Implants Change Your Identity?” (Christine Kenneally, The New Yorker, April 19, 2021).  Known in science fiction as alloplastic devices, or body modifications as old as eyeglasses, things being put in brains are neither new nor truly rare – per this article, 200,000 people internationally have “a neural implant of some kind.”  A case study Kenneally used was of a 49-year-old lifelong-epileptic woman who had an experimental device installed that would tell her 15 minutes before she was to have a seizure.  It was successful, both technically and personally – she was sad when the provider’s funding ran out and she needed to have the device removed – and her personality was different before, during, and after its presence, the latter incorporating insights and confidence she had gained.  Clearly, we now have the possibility of people using such devices for general life improvement alone.

Next, a practice now over 50 years old went under the microscope in “Affirmative Action and America’s ‘Cosmetically Diverse’ College Campuses,” a conversation between Jane Coaston, Jay Caspian Kang, Natasha Warikoo, and Ian Rowe in the New York Times on February 9^th, 2022.  Affirmative action, an outgrowth of the 1960s civil rights movement, was only preferential college admission for blacks, intended to alleviate some combination of historical wrongs and generally worse financial and economic outcomes.  The latter, though, has not consistently materialized for several reasons discussed in the piece:  the tendency of accepted blacks to be wealthy; the de facto admission set-asides for experience with upper-class pursuits such as oboes, fencing, and overseas volunteering; what is almost transparent discrimination against other minorities such as Asians; and serious acclimation problems leading to weak success rates.  Another problem with affirmative action as originally, and generally still, implemented is that choosing people only for their race is distasteful, and yet high school success, along with standardized test scores, varies greatly between racial groups.  It will be up to universities to decide if more blacks is what they want, or would prefer richer students who rate to donate more, or would actually want to provide more help for those with lower family incomes.  The outcome will shape the country more than we may know.

Could it be that “the Internet Is Having Its Midlife Crisis” (Nikki Usher, Slate.com, December 5^th)?  This article was published soon before the current AI boom – that, along with “ChatGPT” and “chatbot,” do not appear in the text.  Instead, the author considers that “many of us who have grown up along with the web are now reaching middle age, and we have enough experience with the internet to know what it does well and does poorly,” and that “many of us have long argued that Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms are public utilities – they provide an essential service to the public by enabling the flow of communication that supports communities, commerce, and access to critical information.”  Usher thought that was the right view, and that such sites should be either fully government-owned or by a “public-private partnership.”  I have advocated wide-scope, even nationwide, Internet access, but the platforms themselves are hardly guaranteed to stay the same, and competition, as weak as it is, would be snuffed out by a one-owner, one-product-per-type mandate.  That alone makes this idea undesirable.

Around the middle of the last decade, there were books on the subject of “Why the Age of American Progress Ended” (Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, January 2023).  This effort printed out to 26 pages.  Thompson spent the first half telling how, over 10,000 years, smallpox appeared and, though a series of events leading to the first vaccine and its proliferation, was cured.  Next, he tried to make the case that such is too rare in our country now, as “the American government has focused overwhelmingly on discovery rather than deployment,” and many initiatives become hamstrung by legal restrictions and lack of private funding interest.  Examples he cited were high-speed rail, nuclear power plants, and even solar and wind farms, the latter “held back by environmental regulations that ironically constrict (their) construction.”  He contrasted those with the success of Covid-19 vaccines, which called for not only “technological breakthroughs,” but, perhaps more importantly, “a policy miracle – a feat of bureaucratic ingenuity that would make, distribute, and administer novel vaccines with record-breaking efficiency.”  Yet, still, the virus failed for many people who refused to use it.  Conservative thinking, though, is hardly the only one to blame for lack of advancement, as “cities and states run by Democrats have erected so many barriers to construction” that “the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington.”  A lot to improve, but the problems here are real.

Last, we would like to know “How to Make the Labor Market Work for More Americans” (The New York Times, January 28^th).  This Editorial Board piece lauded Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro for removing probably unnecessary bachelor’s-degree requirement for “the vast majority of jobs in the state government.”  With many employers looking in vain for workers, there should be a general falling-away of requirements, of certification as well as education, put into place as ways of thinning out the number of qualified applicants.  This was a fine move indeed.  As for the others above, some would be and some would not be – it is up to us to more strongly support the worthiest big ideas.

Artificial Intelligence, After the Bomb Dropped

As rushed as it may seem, the coming of ChatGP4, and the idea of how many things AI can now do and disrupt, are now over, and it is time for us to mop up and figure out where we are and where we should go.  Here are some eminent views from the past five weeks.

A Goldman Sachs April 7^th briefing took a shot at “What AI means for the economy.”  It included an interview with Emad Mostaque, the CEO and founder of Stability AI, who said “the entire cost structure of media creation, video game creation, and others” will “change dramatically,” that “AI-powered instruction” will be so effective that dyslexia, for one, would soon be “solved,” and, overall, that AI would be “a much bigger disruption than the pandemic.”  Goldman Sachs representatives determined that the technology itself could be responsible for a 7% or $7 trillion global GDP rise through 2033 and predicted relatively few layoffs.  But job consolidation was not mentioned, and, perhaps oddly, ten days later Fox Business came out with Eric Revell’s “Two-thirds of US jobs could be exposed to AI-driven automation:  Goldman Sachs,” citing one of that company’s studies, possibly also the basis of the previous article, which concluded that, of the 2/3, “a quarter to one-half of their workload could be replaced by AI.”  Doing the arithmetic gets us one-quarter of our country’s workload replaceable, yet this piece also reported that “increased automation wouldn’t necessarily lead to layoffs,” as positions would be “more likely to be complemented rather than substituted.”  I find it hard to understand why managements would not seek to use the technology to cut costs when that is possible.

What is “The Surprising Thing A.I. Engineers Will Tell You if You Let Them” (Ezra Klein, The New York Times, April 16^th)?  In the field, “person after person” has told the author “that they are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down.  In fact, especially if it slows them down.”  Proposals have quickly been put forth by the White House, the European Commission, and China’s government.  Klein named five things he thought should be high priority:  “the question of interpretability,” or transparency; “security,” or preventing intellectual property theft; “evaluations and audits” of “everything from bias to the ability to scam people to the tendency to replicate themselves across the internet”; “liability,” or who if anyone is responsible for AI’s misdeeds; and “humanness” which he called “a design decision, not an emergent property of machine-learning code.”  Not easy, and I do not know how regulating bodies can keep up.

Author Jaron Lanier offered an April 20^th New Yorker piece, which printed out to 13 pages and was ponderously titled “There Is No A.I.”  He called it “a tool, not a creature,” though acknowledging that we were “at the beginning of a new technological era.”  For Lanier, the likes of GPT-4 “mash up work done by human minds,” but need controls, among which he advocated automatic labeling of “deepfakes – false but real-seeming images, videos, and so on,” “communications coming from artificial people,” and “automated interactions that are designed to manipulate the thinking or actions of a human being.”  He maintained that “the black-box nature of our current A.I. tools must end,” by showing sources, leading to their being credited or paid under what he called “data dignity.”  A radical but conceivable idea, and the labeling may prove to be difficult but necessary.

While to my way of thinking there wasn’t much new in “These jobs are safe from the AI revolution – for now” (Eric Revell, Fox Business, April 21^st), it’s good to see this sort of material in print.  The fields the author cited “tend to involve manual and outdoor work,” specifically, “cleaning; installation, maintenance and repair; construction and extraction; production; and transportation moving.”  This was mostly a recap of the rundown of robot-resistance positions I did in 2012’s Choosing a Lasting Career.

 

Louis Hyman put a positive-of-sorts spin on possible AI job replacements in April 22^nd’s “It’s Not the End of Work.  It’s the End of Boring Work,” in the New York Times.  It’s clear that “the huge productivity gains of the industrial age didn’t happen just because someone invented a new technology; they happened because people also figured out how best to reorganize work around that technology” – indeed, the first steam engine was invented in the second century A.D., and 3D printing has been used far less than its ability, let alone potential.  Per Hyman, the most “tedious” tasks are those AI can be given.  I don’t agree that ending tiresome income sources is what we want, even if that is all that happens.

Finally, a high-level view drove “The Age of Pseudocognition,” a thoughtful four-page piece in the April 22^nd Economist.  Its thesis was that “looking at the impacts of the computer browser, the printing press and psychoanalysis could help prepare the world for AI.”  Web browsers “changed the ways in which computers are used, the way in which the computer industry works and the way information is organised,” allowing “first files and then applications” to be “accessed wherever they might be located.”  As well, “printed books made it possible for scholars to roam larger fields of knowledge than had ever been possible,” and Sigmund Freud’s work meant that “the idea that there are reasons why people do things of which they are not conscious is part of the world’s mental furniture,” meaning in turn that “the sense that there might be something below the AI surface which needs understanding may prove powerful.”  Yes, our understanding of consciousness is in its infancy, and AI rates to be a massive invention.

Over the next several months, despite futile attempts to slow down AI research and progress, many things will happen in this field.  As for several years out, it’s anyone’s guess what front-line artificial intelligence technology will be doing.  Expect more from me, as more critical points emerge and more events take place.

Another Big Jobs Report – New Positions Up, Unemployment Down, AJSN Shows Latent Demand Down To 15.4 Million

One more critical Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary.  One more set of data exceeding expectations and refusing to indicate any movement toward recession.  One more recent-record-breaking American Job Shortage Number (AJSN).  One more time when the peripheral data followed.

We gained 253,000 net new nonfarm payroll positions, almost half again the two 180,000 published estimates.  The seasonally adjusted and unadjusted unemployment rates both fell, the latter by 0.5%, to reach 3.4% and 3.1%.  The numbers of officially jobless people did the same, and are now at 5.7 million (adjusted and roughly rounded) and 5.146 million (unadjusted).  The count of employed added 434,000 to get to 161,075,000.  The number of those working part-time for economic reasons, or maintaining part-time employment while looking for full-time opportunities, shed 200,000 to 3.9 million.  Average private nonfarm payroll wages even got in on the act, rising 16 cents per hour, comfortably above current inflation, to $33.36.  On the non-gaining side, the two indicators showing how common it is for people to be working or close to it, the employment-population ratio and the labor force participation rate, stayed the same, not improving but holding the previous month’s gains, still 60.4% and 62.6%.  The only statistic I track in this series that got worse was the count of long-term unemployed, which added 100,000 to 1.2 million.

The AJSN, the Royal Flush Press metric showing how many positions in addition to those advertised could fast be filled if all knew they would be easy to get, lost almost half a million as follows:

 

Compared with a year before, the AJSN was729,000 lower, with real shrinkages in not only the number unemployed but the number of those wanting work but not looking for it over at least the past 12 months.  The counts of those claiming discouragement and temporarily unavailable also fell significantly.  Noteworthy also was a reduction of almost one million, or over 13%, of those in the military, in institutions, or off the grid.  The share of the AJSN from those officially jobless reached a long-time low at 30.0%, off from 34.3%, and this was the first month in at least eight years where more latent demand came from those uninterested in working, even at its 5% contribution, than from those unemployed.

What else can we say about this morning’s report?  In American employment, these are among the best times we have ever had.  More and more people are finding work, and those officially jobless continue shrinking in number.  If full employment is 4%, something I once heard, what are these levels?  How much more favorable can the other numbers get?  We don’t know, but their improvement pace is still brisk.  Between March and April, our population increased less than 69,000 – we added more than three times as many new jobs.  Wages even gained.  Covid now appears to be fading, and hasn’t been a widespread employment impeder for a year.  We’re setting records now.  The turtle, once again, stretched heartily and moved in the right direction.

Home vs. Office: More Elephants Than a First-Rate Zoo

“The elephant in the room:  a major problem or controversial issue that is obviously present but avoided as a subject for discussion because it is more comfortable to do so.” – Oxford Languages

We have ‘em here, folks.

Until ChatGPT and its kin came along, remote work was without competition as the largest issue facing employed American workers.  Why has assessing its merits been hopelessly difficult?  One reason has been the perpetual failure of businesses to learn from experience.  Another was the pandemic, when many companies had no choice but to embrace work outside the office.  A third is a lack of good information.  But a fourth is that the space for reflection, analysis, and communication has been crowded.  Eight elephants in that room take up a lot of space, and they haven’t gone anywhere. 

What are these pachyderms?  Here they are, posed as questions nobody seems to want to go on record answering.

First, how many hours of actual net work are people putting in during days they are working from home and during days they are in the office?

Second, how can anyone claim to know quantifiable performance levels for non-production cubicle workers?

Third, how many daily or weekly on-the-job hours do managements expect from full-time employees?

Fourth, when companies change from five to four-day workweeks, how many actual on-the-job hours do they expect before and after the change? 

Fifth, to what extent, if any, does an impressive set of annual achievements compensate, in performance reviews, salary treatment, and promotions, for lower than usual work hours?

Sixth, how do managements tell the difference between quality and quantity of actual work and hours spent at it?

Seventh, what are managements’ true attitude toward people working extra hours?

Eighth, what limits, if any, are there on flexible time for people working from home?

As an old but real sample, here are the answers, as I understood them, in force during my AT&T 1990s management career.

On the first, those telecommuting, as it was then known, clearly worked less than if they were in the office, but actual work there seldom approached eight daily hours.  One co-worker of mine spent a year and a half in the office 25 weekly hours and working about 5 – it took a large, general downsizing for this person to be removed.  But others reported for 60 or more.

On the second, management muddled performance levels out for annual reviews, but perception levels varied dramatically.

Third, ostensibly 40 per week, but with long lunches the norm actually more like 35, though extra hours received a small amount of appreciation.

The fourth did not apply.  On the fifth, it generally compensated well, unless the immediate supervisor did not like the worker in question.

On the sixth, employee writeups for performance reviews often helped, but beyond that it was sketchy.

Seventh, they enjoyed people being there longer, but though they postured about it being necessary, they always stopped short of requiring it.

On the eighth, I knew of none.  People telecommuting were often unavailable during normal business times, to the point of asking that others did not call them.  Overall, days working from home were treated as midway between being in the office and having the day off.

How does your work group compare?  Is or was yours also officially silent on all eight?  I don’t think that has changed much in thirty years. 

Of course, organizations, and groups and managers within organizations, will differ on these issues.  But until we can get baselines on these, and understand what the norms really are, we will make little progress with them, and get the least of our human resources by confusing and discouraging people trying to play by the rules.  That’s a waste for all concerned.