Latest news with #disorganization
Khaleej Times
2 days ago
- Khaleej Times
'Waited for hours': Some Filipino workers frustrated after thousands throng Dubai event
What was meant to be a streamlined public service event for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in the UAE turned into a source of frustration for many attendees, after the OFW Serbisyo Caravan held at the Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) on Sunday, August 3, drew unexpected crowds and criticism for "poor organisation". Organised by the Department of Migrant Workers (DMW), the event was scheduled to run from 8am to 6pm, aiming to bring together key government agencies under one roof to assist Filipinos with various services, such as legal aid, financial support, and welfare counselling. But the experience for many turned out to be far from smooth. Several OFWs described the event as 'disorganised and overwhelming', citing long queues, a lack of direction, and overcrowded conditions. One resident, who asked to remain anonymous, recounted his experience to Khaleej Times. 'My friend and I arrived at the venue at 8.30am, thinking we were early enough to beat the crowds, but the line was already snaking around the building,' the 28-year-old shared. 'There was no one guiding us, no signs, no system. We just followed the crowd and hoped we were going the right way.' The Ajman resident said he ended up walking aimlessly through the hot halls with no clear directions. 'I ended up in a room packed with people. It was hot and overcrowded,' he said. 'At one point, we were just standing in line in the hallway for three hours outside the hall." He and his companion finally completed their transactions by 7pm, nearly 11 hours after they arrived. 'We were thankful to be assisted eventually, and there were some seats and a food vendor inside.' Some attendees also pointed out that all the services — ranging from registering for Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) to contract verification — were clustered into one space, which led to further confusion. 'There were no clear signs and no separation of services. People didn't know where to go or which line to join,' Dubai-based expat Maria T. said. H.T., another OFW, noted that although she scanned a QR code to receive a digital queue number, there was "no system in place" to enforce the order. "People continued lining up wherever they wanted. When I finally got into the hall, it was more chaos inside." According to her, even as they exited the venue at 7pm, long queues still remained. 'Some had already given up and gone home. It wasn't what we expected.' Not everyone, however, had a negative experience. K.A., another attendee, said the crowd outside appeared hectic but things improved inside. 'The flow was actually very quick. I got my contract verified and managed to register with OWWA without any issues,' she said. She shared that, while there were no clear directions at the start, she was able to avoid most of the chaos because she got there early and knew her way to Hall 8. K.A. shared that she got to the World Trade Centre at 6am because she already anticipated the long lines. "There was no metro service yet, so there were fewer people,' she shared. 'I queued from 6am to 10am. The crowd really started to build around 8am, and from then on, it got really crowded." Unexpected turnout John Rio A. Bautista, Labor Attaché of the Migrant Workers Office Dubai, acknowledged the negative feedback. According to him, the event saw an unexpectedly high turnout of nearly 6,000 individuals — far exceeding their initial estimate of 2,000. The event was organised in partnership with the Filipino Social Club, which saw 200 members volunteer to assist with the event. When the turnout exceeded expectations, crowd control measures were implemented. "DMW officials, Consul General Marford Angeles of PCG Dubai, and the President of the Filipino Social Club (FilSoc) personally met with representatives from the Dubai World Trade Centre, the Community Development Authority (CDA), and Dubai Police to help manage order," he explained. "Ambassador Alfonso Ver also took the lead in speaking with attendees at the hall entrances and helping organise the queues to manage the flow of people. Announcements were made regularly during the programme to inform them of alternative solutions." According to Bautista, in DMW's effort to make services accessible to more people, it did not make pre-registration mandatory on the assumption that turnout would mirror previous events, where only about half of those who registered actually showed up. However, this decision, combined with wide online promotion and social media traction, led to an unmanageable surge of walk-ins. Need for improved planning Despite the chaos, the DMW reported that all clients who opted to wait were eventually served — with the final transaction completed at 1.45am the following day: Monday, August 4. A total of 5,742 individuals were assisted, and over 11,383 transactions were recorded. The agency acknowledged the need for improved planning moving forward, including implementing strict pre-registration, limiting daily capacity per service, and potentially expanding the event across multiple emirates or extending it over several days. "Despite our good intentions to cater to as many clients as possible, it is crucial to set the limit by requiring pre-registration per individual agency's set limit," said Bautista. He noted that a proposal is already in place to hold the next Caravan in Abu Dhabi, with a longer duration to better accommodate demand.
Forbes
5 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Office Hellscapes And AI Process Mapping
Why are human workplaces so disorganized? In some ways, it's a question people have been asking themselves ever since the first cubicle dwellers rose up from the primordial swamp - whenever that was. We know that larger systems tend to be disordered, especially if they're administrated by humans. Just go read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and it might remind you of the modern office – people and products and materials strewn about a gigantic footprint, with very little centralized control. You get the same kind of idea reading the most recent piece by Ethan Mollick on the site where he posts his essays, One Useful Thing. I always follow his posts, interested in his emerging take on the technologies that are so new to all of us. Mollick has MIT ties, and an excellent track record looking at the AI revolution from a fresh perspective. The Office Dilemma Human wothis most recent piece, he talks about process mapping and how AI can help people to sort through the disorganization of a business. Think of a company with 100 or more employees, and probably a dozen locations. The first thing you tend to find is that sense of disorder. Mollick talks about a 'Garbage Can' principle, which posits that most businesses are a collection of disparate processes thrown into a large, disorganized bin. To me, you could use the analogy of what programmers used to call 'DLL hell' in the earlier days of the Internet. DLLs are digital libraries. Their application was often chaotic and disordered. There were dependencies that would flummox even the most seasoned engineers, because things were complicated and chaotic. That's what a large company is often like. Everyone for Themselves Mollick also pointed to some numbers that I've seen in various studies, and presented at conferences where we've talked about AI over the past year. His number was 43% – the number of employees who are using AI in the workplace. But as Mollick points out, and as I've heard before, most of them are using AI in personal ways. The use of the tools is not ordered across an organization – it's piecemeal. It's people using an AI tool like you would use a hammer, or a saw, or a drill, or a lathe --- largely in an unsupervised way. However, in general, it seems AI is largely catching on, especially when it comes to product development. You have resources like this one from the Texas Workforce Commission, referencing thousands of AI jobs. So even if there's not much centralized AI in the boardroom, there is abundant AI in business processes. It's just that those processes may or may not be unified. The Bitter Lesson Then Mollick references something called the 'Bitter lesson' that's attributed to Robert Sutton in 2019. It's the idea that AI will prove to be cognitively superior to humans without a lot of poking and prodding – but given enough time and compute, the system will find its own way to solve problems. That phrase, problem solving, is what people have been saying is the unique province of humans. It's the idea that AI can do the data-crunching, but people are still doing the creative problem-solving. Well, that bastion of human ingenuity doesn't seem that safe anymore. Mollick references the early days of chess machine evolution, where eventually Deep Blue beat Kasparov. He notes that there are two ways to go about this – you can program in innumerable chess rules, and have the system sort through them and apply them, or you can just show the system thousands of chess games, and it will make those connections on its own. Back to Machine Learning Principles Reading through this, I was reminded of the early days of machine learning, where people talked a good bit about supervised versus unsupervised learning. We often used the analogy of fruit in a digital software program enhanced with machine learning properties. Supervised learning would be labeling each fruit with its own tag – banana – apple - or grapes. The program would then learn to correlate between its training data and new real-world data. That comparison would be its main method. And that comparison isn't hugely cognitive. It follows the tradition of deterministic programming. The unsupervised version would be simply to tell the program that bananas are yellow and long, that grapes are purple or green and have clusters, and the apples are red or green and round. Then the system goes out, looks at the pictures and applies that logic. The interesting thing here is taking that analogy to the bitter lesson. Is AI more powerful if it simply analyzes reams of training data without applied logic? Or is it more powerful if it can actually distinguish between various kinds of outcomes based on requested logical processes? Which came first: the chicken or the egg? The theory of the bitter lesson seems to be that the system can actually do better through supervised learning. But that supervision doesn't necessarily have to be human oversight. The machine gets a practically infinite set of training data, and makes all of its own conclusions. That's contrasted to an approach where people tell the machine what to do, and it learns based on those suggestions. Back in the era of supervised versus unsupervised learning, the unsupervised learning seemed more powerful. It seemed more resource-intensive. But AI might finally show us up just by doing things in a more efficient way – if I can use one more analogy, it's the traditional idea of the Laplace demon, an invention of the physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace who suggested that if you know enough data points, you can predict the future. In other words, brute force programming is king. We learned a lot of this in the big data age, before we learned to use LLMs, and now we're seeing the big data age on steroids. In Conclusion I also found a very interesting take at the end of Mollick's essay where he talks about businesses going down one or the other avenue of progress. Sure enough, he suggested that these companies are playing chess with each other – that one of these chess teams consists of companies using AI to be logical, and that another chess team consists of businesses using it for brute force programming and classification. If all of this is a little hard to follow, it's because we're pretty securely in the realm of AI philosophy here. It makes you think about not just whether AI is going to win out over human workers, but how it's going to do it. I forgot to mention the exponential graph that Mollick includes showing that we're closer to AGI then most people would imagine. Let's look back at the end of this year and see how this plays out.
