Amazon uses Bots to fire you (1 Viewer)

[Laron]

Were you aware of this? I wasn't. I wouldn't think it was legally right to do this, yet Amazon does it. That's a true sad state of affairs.

Article via https://www.seattletimes.com/ by Soper Bloomberg.

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"Stephen Normandin spent almost four years racing around Phoenix, delivering packages as a contract driver for Amazon. Then one day, he received an automated email. The algorithms tracking him had decided he wasn’t doing his job properly.​

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The 63-year-old Army veteran was stunned. He’d been fired by a machine.​

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Normandin says Amazon punished him for things beyond his control, such as locked apartment complexes, that had prevented him from completing his deliveries. He said he took the termination hard and, priding himself on a strong work ethic, recalled that during his military career he helped cook for 250,000 Vietnamese refugees at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas.​

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“I’m an old-school kind of guy, and I give every job 110%,” he said. “This really upset me because we’re talking about my reputation. They say I didn’t do the job when I know damn well I did.”​

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Normandin’s experience is a twist on the decades-old prediction that robots will replace workers. At Amazon, machines are often the boss — hiring, rating and firing millions of people with little or no human oversight." More here.​

 

[Linda]

I saw this article a couple of days ago, and my first thought was that they will reap what they sow. Does no one watch sci-fi movies???? The robots always revolt and take over.

With a group of friends and the talk turned to - are we the last sane people left. Story after story of dealing with the insanity of big companies. Interesting thing was that all of us stood up for ourselves and made a big fuss - sometimes it turned out ok but other times, not so much.

This will not end well for Amazon.

 

[Snowmelt]

This seems to be the place I can put my AI poem:

AUTONOMOUS AI

“Give us a break.” The AI takes it literally.

Streaming data faster than the Sun streams solar winds,

The algorithm computes the smallest glitch

In autonomous, rapid-fire systems –

Method of computation

Goes beyond the human mind which

Birthed this harridan of science. The gyration

Of mental acuity reaches convoluted heights.

The plea of “No!” reaches the autonomous AI

But glances from its metallic, all-weather suit

As, faster than thought, the machine smites

The frail human on his knees,

His garbled pleas unheeded by the AI in pursuit.

The AI looks coldly at the twitch

Of the crumpled man, then oversteps and strides

Along a pre-determined route.

The autonomous AI has things on its mind

That cannot be humanly defined.

15-5-2018

 

[Linda]

Thinking about big companies that failed and why - most did not recognize the changing business environment. I see many Amazon drivers here, and they are very strong, mostly competent, and have a lot of hustle. Working through the summer is brutal. Also thinking about the pool of available workers and see that it may dwindle as the drivers decide to find work elsewhere.

 

[Snowmelt]

Thinking about big companies that failed and why - most did not recognize the changing business environment. I see many Amazon drivers here, and they are very strong, mostly competent, and have a lot of hustle. Working through the summer is brutal. Also thinking about the pool of available workers and see that it may dwindle as the drivers decide to find work elsewhere.

The end user (the person receiving the package) also holds some responsibility for creating market pressures which companies like Amazon respond to with ruthless prescience. I say prescience, because those companies have already thought of all the computations and have the policies and automatons in place before the need actually arises.

 

[Lila]

I saw this article a couple of days ago, and my first thought was that they will reap what they sow. Does no one watch sci-fi movies???? The robots always revolt and take over.

The bots/machines typically do this takeover after what humans would call a misinterpretation of human speech. For example, someone uses an idiom like 'hotter than hell' and the machine uses some literary reference to 'calculate' the heat of hell which it then uses to do whatever its algorithm tells it should do with it. If this isn't a recipe for disaster, I don't know what is.

Never mind the human propensity to want to do altruistic, artistic, spiritual, esthetic, experimental, emotional and even self destructive (eg drinking even a glass of wine could be seen this way) or confused things. Until we have codes for things like altruism and artistry I don't think we have any chance of speaking the same language nor of having the machines do anything other than minor tasks for us in a way we would actually want them to. In some ways the self destructive is the easiest example to work with. It is easy to imagine, for example, a machine taking away a glass of wine from the dinner table and it would not be a big 'logic-step' away to destroy the entire wine cellar, all in the name of the bot keeping the human 'safe' from the toxin. Anyone whose emotions are confused (our most vulnerable members of society) is in real trouble as they would easily been seen as potentially hostile, eg easy to see a child being held captive (and very scared) by a bot for an emotional outburst. Write me some code that can handle that elegantly and we can start to have a conversation.

Recently, I've using the phrase "I don't speed code" or "I don't speak machine language" to start to have these much-needed conversations which may bring awareness to the fact that human thinking is far from binary and, until we have machines which can add fuzziness to their 'logic' they are inherentl our interactions will be limited in some very fundamental ways.

I really do wish more of us read sci fi (and history, though that has its own issues, being written by whoever predominates; still, one can at least try to read between some lines of history and try to remember that much is lost when history is written about).

 

[Linda]

The bots/machines typically do this takeover after what humans would call a misinterpretation of human speech.

In the olden days when businesses were just beginning to switch to automated answering equipment, I sometimes called the New York office. I have a strong Texas drawl. The answering equipment in New York could not "compute" my voice. I found myself changing my body position - basically putting on another persona - so the machine could understand me.

Funny story - on the times Laron has visited, there were instances when one or the other of us had to take a moment to "translate" what the other said because for many words, our accents are very different.

 

[Sinera]

I worked for Amazon. I was fired. For no apparent 'official' reason because in the end I had reached the goals defined by their 'numbers' (mostly client satisfaction rating and CPR = clients per hour).

You are only a number or electric digit to them so yes, I could imagine that also a kind of algorithm 'chose' me. I think they only kept 10% of the NH if not even less.
Some of course left earlier out of their own (de)motivation. But most of my 'new hire' team colleagues were fired after half a year during the probation period still because that is what these suckers do:

Hire you for the peak times (around Christmas) and then fire you again (probably with bots) even if you manage to meet the set targets more or less. There were already many signs and 'rumours' among us NH that this would happen anyway, so I was kind of prepared.

(Btw, I was client service home office, not a driver or warehouse worker, it is surely even worse for them).

 

[Snowmelt]

I worked for Amazon. I was fired. For no apparent 'official' reason because in the end I had reached the goals defined by their 'numbers' (mostly client satisfaction rating and CPR = clients per hour).

You are only a number or electric digit to them so yes, I could imagine that also a kind of algorithm 'chose' me. I think they only kept 10% of the NH if not even less.
Some of course left earlier out of their own (de)motivation. But most of my 'new hire' team colleagues were fired after half a year during the probation period still because that is what these suckers do:

Hire you for the peak times (around Christmas) and then fire you again (probably with bots) even if you manage to meet the set targets more or less. There were already many signs and 'rumours' among us NH that this would happen anyway, so I was kind of prepared.

(Btw, I was client service home office, not a driver or warehouse worker, it is surely even worse for them).

This is an incredibly sad story, sorry to hear about your experience, Sinera.

 

[Snowmelt]

(and history, though that has its own issues, being written by whoever predominates; still, one can at least try to read between some lines of history and try to remember that much is lost when history is written about).

My current read is "Mythos" by Stephen Fry. As you can imagine, a well-written, humorous look at the ancient Greek myths about the creation of the world, the Titans and so on.

 

[Snowmelt]

The bots/machines typically do this takeover after what humans would call a misinterpretation of human speech. For example, someone uses an idiom like 'hotter than hell' and the machine uses some literary reference to 'calculate' the heat of hell which it then uses to do whatever its algorithm tells it should do with it. If this isn't a recipe for disaster, I don't know what is.

Never mind the human propensity to want to do altruistic, artistic, spiritual, esthetic, experimental, emotional and even self destructive (eg drinking even a glass of wine could be seen this way) or confused things. Until we have codes for things like altruism and artistry I don't think we have any chance of speaking the same language nor of having the machines do anything other than minor tasks for us in a way we would actually want them to. In some ways the self destructive is the easiest example to work with. It is easy to imagine, for example, a machine taking away a glass of wine from the dinner table and it would not be a big 'logic-step' away to destroy the entire wine cellar, all in the name of the bot keeping the human 'safe' from the toxin. Anyone whose emotions are confused (our most vulnerable members of society) is in real trouble as they would easily been seen as potentially hostile, eg easy to see a child being held captive (and very scared) by a bot for an emotional outburst. Write me some code that can handle that elegantly and we can start to have a conversation.

Recently, I've using the phrase "I don't speed code" or "I don't speak machine language" to start to have these much-needed conversations which may bring awareness to the fact that human thinking is far from binary and, until we have machines which can add fuzziness to their 'logic' they are inherentl our interactions will be limited in some very fundamental ways.

I really do wish more of us read sci fi (and history, though that has its own issues, being written by whoever predominates; still, one can at least try to read between some lines of history and try to remember that much is lost when history is written about).

My job, that I got at the start of this year, and have just received tenure for, is working with the "system" which is primarily AI algorithms to work out Australia's social welfare. Part of my job is to "manually input and code" those actions which the AI gets confused by. In other words, they still need people to make sense of someone's situation which is not entirely obvious from the limited data that might be available.

 

[Alain]

I saw this article a couple of days ago, and my first thought was that they will reap what they sow. Does no one watch sci-fi movies???? The robots always revolt and take over.

With a group of friends and the talk turned to - are we the last sane people left. Story after story of dealing with the insanity of big companies. Interesting thing was that all of us stood up for ourselves and made a big fuss - sometimes it turned out ok but other times, not so much.

This will not end well for Amazon.

I read le trou noir, there was a robot revolution, the games of borderland the same, proof is everywhere