I was fired by an algorithm in early 2019 when working for Amazon Flex. Basically, on the app, "blocks" would appear, which would be a set $ amount for approximate X number of deliveries to X location. Then you would drive to a "fulfillment" center to pick up your boxes. You had to be quick to grab a block before someone else did. Occasionally I would drop a block and grab a higher-yielding one. It wasn't clear to me that this was frowned upon by the app. After a few weeks of this work, I was "deactivated" without any warning. I called their customer "service" line and was told that I was deactivated in their system and there was no recourse for me. That really sucked.
The gig economy industry has managed to steal back decades worth of workers rights, and the worst thing is that this will take decades to undo.
Almost everyone has been groomed to defend these corporate behemots' rights to stomp on our lives like if they were defending the right of a small mom and pop shop to kick out a rowdy drunkard.
When a company has a bigger revenue than most contries' gdp they shouldn't play by the same rules, they need to be held to a different set of standards.
> When a company has a bigger revenue than most contries' gdp they shouldn't play by the same rules, they need to be held to a different set of standards.
This is the part where it stops making sense to me. I don't see why it's morally more just for a mom and pop shop to abuse workers than it is for a big corporation. If it's wrong to treat workers poorly, it should be wrong for everyone to treat workers poorly. This logic implies that the amount you're "allowed" to abuse your workers is on a sliding scale with income. Big corporations should be nice to workers, small businesses are allowed to not be nice to workers, so are businesses in poor countries allowed to be outright awful to their workers? It sounds like the start of a justification for slavery in third world countries.
You can make the argument that Amazon can afford it, and mom and pop shops can't, but I don't find that a convincing argument. It bears the same issues as above. If we establish a sliding scale, we can't simply ignore the implications at the extremes.
Personally, I think we just need to raise the bar across the board. It's bad when Amazon does it, and it's bad when small businesses do it. Small businesses shouldn't get a break on labor violations.
> I don't see why it's morally more just for a mom and pop shop to abuse workers than it is for a big corporation.
You are of course right, and we don't want abuse at either scale. I think GP is also relying on mom and pop shops not having enough economic power to abuse workers at that level.
A local business usually can't afford burning through workers like cigarettes, it would go out of business at the 3rd contractor (and hopefully these 3 people can take legal action without a barrage of lawyers sucking their life savings).
Amazon can afford to burn through thousands without seeing any clear impact on its bottomline. That's where rules should be stricter IMO.
When I see people slaving away on a bicycle in any kind of weather, delivering groceries or boxes of food, I feel pity. I know they earn very little, have very few benefits, and literally zero chance of moving up. It's a dead end job.
It's modern poverty. It's the tiny house equivalent of a job.
I used to bike for Deliveroo in France, as a delivery driver. Nowadays people pay refugees and illegal immigrants 100€ a week for them to deliver in their name.
I've personally met those refugees, I've personally heard their slavers boasting about it. I'd estimate their proportion in Paris around 30% of all Deliveroo drivers. In smaller cities it's not as common.
These slavers will open accounts in the name of their whole family, and they keep 75% of what those poor guys will make.
The other side likes that too, I can assure you. Otherwise they would tackle it through legislation. They won't and it is not due to a lack of ability or that their mechanisms are shot down. They just need to blame it on the other club and some people that believe them. Et voilà...
Don’t you ever think – “what would the world be like if the bad guys won?” Who said they didn’t? It is all in the eye of the beholder. If we apply some ethics like the golden rule to modern existence, then you spend your time debating where to apply it because it’s near impossible.
I have been reading SF for most of my entire life and I am not sure I can think of a single book that presented "de facto rule by extremely powerful corporations" as a good thing. They're pretty much always villains when they show up.
By the time I've eaten lunch, I've been exposed to propaganda from every media portal in a fairly relentless manner both in the form of advertising and manufactured messages disguised as news. That may include comments created by algorithms and posted by bots impersonating persons. I can't deny that existence increasingly feels inauthentic by design and that alone creates subtle anxiety every day. Add in the constant high-attention grabbing headlines, images, or videos – are those the cause of my escapist dreams?
Like you, science fiction has been a cornerstone of my life since early childhood. For the longest time, I believed our digital selves we're capable of being functional alter egos in a new digital medium separated from physical existence, but that is not what happened. Instead, our real selves and the digital world have merged and in many ways they are inseparable. The pitfalls of this intertwined world are all too visible as society finds itself in drastic divides ranging from political views to music tastes. This coming from someone who believed positive technology advancements would outweigh the negatives, but I can only see the downsides lately. I think I lost the plot and it is all too blurry now. Maybe I need a vacation.
At a minimum, this is a false dichotomy. Stopping for a moment to think creatively, there are many alternatives. Many of those alternatives would probably serve human welfare better than what we have today.
Living in the country that produces and exports the most weapons, and that also extracts the most hydrocarbons, I came to believe that I lived a superior life via effective propaganda. Now I come to see that these actions are not only against my values, but that they also cause great harm.
Amazon has plenty of money though? Their bet is that no matter how badly they treat their workers, there will be more. They seem to be right. Worse case they have to start treating them well now and still saved all that money in the past. Hardly idiocracy.
The only question was how much poo we wanted there to be.
Though gross, That one sentence should tell us their entire line of thinking.
Absolutely nothing will happen to them and they know it. Mistreat one guy, there are 10 others to take his place. There is zero incentive to treat people well.
Unionizing would help, but that doesn’t seem to be happening either
Oh, I knew the reference,I just had you confused.I thought you meant Amazon was the idiot running out of money in this situation, but I think now you meant the workers working for them are? That makes more sense.
"The UK GDPR gives people the right not to be subject to solely automated decisions, including profiling, which have a legal or similarly significant effect on them." I guess that would probably be buried in an employment contract at Amazon, but it might form the basis for a court case if it wasn't actually spelt out.
Just because a human has designed the algorithm doesn't make it non-automated: "A process might still be considered solely automated if a human inputs the data to be processed, and then the decision-making is carried out by an automated system. A process won’t be considered solely automated if someone weighs up and interprets the result of an automated decision before applying it to the individual."
> Just because a human has designed the algorithm doesn't make it non-automated: "A process might still be considered solely automated if a human inputs the data to be processed, and then the decision-making is carried out by an automated system. A process won’t be considered solely automated if someone weighs up and interprets the result of an automated decision before applying it to the individual."
Lawyers have a tendency to create employment for other lawyer-type professions it seems.
Yeah, for sure. But if GP was fired like this then a bet a bunch of people were, and if they were in the EU they might be able to make it a class action.
I think this is horrible treatment. For one, it was not transparent as to what's happening. For two, the termination was instant with no recourse.
I don't think human vs automation is the question here. This would not look better if a human boss would evaluate you, and just say in one morning that you're fired, so don't come in. Like in the Back to the Future movie.
I was working in early 2019 as well. I used a program to grab blocks quickly instead of just looking at the screen for hours to wait for a block. I did receive an email warning but did not get fired. I also spoofed location so I can tell the app I am at the warehouse on time even if I was late.
Bad automated policy is bad because the policy is bad, not because automation is bad.
Automation applies policy evenly. An employee can be sure that the firing wasn't due to a boss having a bad day, not liking the employee personally, not noticing worse performance of colleagues, etc.
The real problem comes when automated assessment is poorly designed. And it's a shame not only because of the heartless actions that impact real people's lives and the needless public relations damage that is bound to emerge. It's also a shame because of the lost opportunity to help workers' performance improve via feedback at a level of detail that the automated systems could provide.
Damn the secrecy. Develop an open rating system that provides continuous feedback to the worker. Build in dampers that provide ample time to learn, correct mistakes, and improve. Publish every factor, every consideration, every weight that goes into the assessment. Openly. Refine over and over until both management and the workforce see it as fair and helpful.
I would take that system over the subjective, unevenly applied, unclear criteria that's historically been used to assess performance. No surprises to the workers, and management has to own the criteria rather than hide behind unpublished automation. Objectivity should be a virtue. Without transparency, it's going to prove to be quite the vice.
Totally disagree. No system of rules could ever handle all the obscure edge-cases that humans can. Just look to all the Google account automated-flagging issues that pop up on HN, for reference.
What could maybe work is an automated system for the "easy 90%", paired with an appeals system well-staffed by human beings. But that isn't Amazon's plan (or Google's, etc), because that 10% will cost much more than the first 90%, so it's easier for them to just write it off as a loss. And at their scale, that margin of error translates to thousands of potentially-ruined lives.
> No system of rules could ever handle all the obscure edge-cases that humans can.
In the US federal criminal justice system during the 1970s and early 80s judges had a ton of discretion over sentencing. Some were “hanging judges” that gave really harsh sentences. Some never gave any harsh sentences. Some gave harsh sentences to black people but not to white people, and so on.
The legal profession and Congress looked at this situation and decided it wasn’t fair. The difference between probation and ten years in prison shouldn’t be whether or not the judge had indigestion. The federal sentencing guidelines were put in place—-a very detailed system that considered the crime, mitigating and aggregating circumstances, the background of the convict, and several other relevant factors. Judges were supposed to use this system to impose uniform, fair sentences.
Judges hated the sentencing guidelines and kept on trying to depart from them “in the interest of justice”. For a while the Supreme Court said no—-it forced them to follow the system. But in the mid aughts a new majority reversed these precedents. The sentencing guidelines were declared to be advisory.
It took a while for the guidelines era habits to fade but now we are back to a situation where which judge you get is a significant factor in how harsh a sentence you get.
In theory the magic answer is guided discretion. That allows for mostly uniform treatment and a safety valve for unusual situations. But how do you enforce that on a nuts and bolts level? Everyone thinks his particular case is special. Thoughtful empathetic judges are likely to be persuaded that they are.
I don’t know what the answer is but I do know there isn’t an easy one.
If no system of rules can ever cover the policy space, then the policy itself is necessarily ill-defined. That alone is a problem before automation considerations. I'm arguing that automation provides the opportunity to make good, open assessment part of a process of improvement rather than opaquely driving firings.
> then the policy itself is necessarily ill-defined
I'm saying no policy could ever be defined well enough to cover all possible contingencies of a messy, human world. The conceit that it could is one of the biggest driving factors of our nascent tech-dystopia.
An open policy would of course be better than a closed policy, if only because it would lay bare all of its flaws, but even then it could never be completely fixed.
Not when people are punished as a result of them. It's fine to make a generalization that works on average for some low stakes, benign decision, but when it materially affects real people, it is not right to generalize. This is the core argument imo against algorithmic decision making of this kind.
You can make the exact same argument in reverse. When decisions materially affect real people, it is unacceptable and fundamentally unfair to rely on human judgement, along with its biases and capriciousness. Clear, transparent policy applied evenly and without bias is a more fair approach for people.
No, it doesnt work that way. By projecting real, complex decisions down to some low dimensional set of criteria, you automatically throw away information and generalize. It's only fair in the sense that the criteria is the same, but it's necessarily based on some kind of average outcome and so effectively sacrifices outliers. Its is still extremely unfair to inputs (who are actual people in the cases we mean) that exhibit characteristics that reliably fit the prediction on average, but that don't conform to the prediction.
This seems like a restatement of the argument that if we just code enough 'if..then..else' statements, we'd get a well-behaved general AI.
That approach hasn't worked, and complicating rules and procedures to cover all edge cases will fall short too. That's why judges are still humans. The list of edge cases, the number of factors that can go into a decision, is correlated to the number of things possible in reality. It's basically unbounded.
If I've misunderstood and you are arguing instead for a clear and minimal set of rules to flag and trigger a human review, that sounds sensible to me. In my experience though when companies find an exception they update the policy, and before you know it it becomes a tangled mess.
Such a hybrid, automanual system is certainly viable, and your analogy to laws being rules and judges being interpreters is reasonable.
In that context, consider that a single law, "do the right thing," might require too many judges and might produce too inconsistent of outcomes to work well. "The right thing" may have to be better defined.
Similarly for company policy, it is not the automation used to express bad, ill-defined, or secretive policy that's the problem. The problem is the policy itself.
Machine may screw up 10%, human will screw up another 10%. The difference is that machine will be fair for 90% cases, and human will not. I doubt google flagging issue will be better with humans. Yes, it is not perfect, just as road accidents do happen a lot even though human drivers are in those cars.
However, I'll just add that, having tried to design such systems in the past (for large-scale Mechanical Turk work), it is fiendishly complex. Not only is it incredibly difficult to turn our intuitions of "what's fair" into formulas, but then you've got to deal with people trying to game those rules for their own advantage once they figure them out, which ultimately means you can only ever be partially transparent at best.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's impossible for all pretty much practical purposes that need to be cost-effective, sadly. It's a really tough problem.
This is one of those things I wish more people understood. Second-order effects can be hard to predict, but if it's a rule and it involves human beings, then you can be pretty sure the second-order effect will be "people try to game the rule."
I love that it doesn't work. I don't get the purpose. Why not do something constructive in the meantime?
Setting up any KPI will reward those that optimize for them. Other workers need to emulate that behavior, which makes their work insufferable. You won't see medium to long term advantage from this.
Define what you need to produce and check if you meet targets. Don't surveil people, it is a waste of time.
> people trying to game those rules for their own advantage once they figure them out
I mean, good for them. They deserve my money for obeying the letter of my requirements. That's exactly what I want them to do. If the letter of the requirements don't accurately and precisely represent the spirit of the requirements, that's on me.
IMHO that sort of adversarial relationship is extremely helpful at developing a good formal spec for the requirements in the first place. It's TDD, but with a monetary incentive on the part of the developer to "code to make the test pass" and nothing more. You don't get to rely on the developer's charitability—the only knob you get to turn, is what test you write!
Of course, in the end, the "tests" might need to be Sufficiently Advanced for this to work, e.g. a spec that specifies something as "what a layman would understand X to be" — where actually evaluating that in an automated way would involve automating a "jury of your peers" type setup to act as the "layman."
I think you're misunderstanding, so here's an example:
The rules might be set up to allow 4 excuses of "building couldn't be accessed" per week before a warning, and 3 warnings in any 60-day period before firing.
If you don't know this, then you simply do your job, and report when a building can't be accessed.
If you do know this, then sometimes you're feeling lazy, want to go home a bit earlier and not do your job, and you lie and report the building can't be accessed, because you know you're under the threshold and so won't be fired.
This isn't about requirements. It's about setting thresholds to catch people who are intentionally not performing their job.
That is about requirements, though. The failure in this example reflects a gap in the spec where there should have been a requirement for proof of building inaccessibility, in the form of e.g. a video of the worker trying and failing to open the door.
At it happens, this exact thing is 99% of the reason Amazon requires its delivery people to take+submit a photo proof of a delivery when they mark the package as "left at door." Without that requirement, they'd be able to just toss the packages out and mark them as "left at door." Amazon doesn't show those pictures to customers to show them where the package was left — that part should be obvious. They show them to customers so the customer can drive the complaint process when the picture shows that the driver did something stupid! The fact that customers are handed this evidence, in turn disincentivizes drivers from doing something stupid with customers' packages in the first place.
(This personally happened to me just last week: I ordered an Amazon package, and the driver left it at — and took a picture
of — the door of a condo within a building that, per the picture, was a completely different building from the one I live in. That picture was very helpful in getting [Amazon's customer service to contact the driver to get] me my package. That was an accident on the driver's part, but it should be clear to the drivers that this is a system that would track — and automatically punish — any attempt at intentional malfeasance at this step, on the basis of this same evidence.)
Not everything has proof, or has proof that is cost-effective to generate.
Amazon requiring its workers to photograph packages is a great idea, and one I applaud them for.
But most instances of employees running into difficulties don't have such elegant solutions. Unless you want employees to be wearing bodycams their whole shift... and then you're going to have to pay other people to review the footage which can take serious time...
> Unless you want employees to be wearing bodycams their whole shift... and then you're going to have to pay other people to review the footage which can take serious time...
Proof can (and should) be positive, rather than adversarial. You could have a bodycam that's recording for the whole shift, but — like in the case of the Amazon driver's photograph — the onus is on the worker to (hopefully with app assistance) trim their bodycam footage down to a short clip that proves the building was inaccessible, and then submit that clip as part of their report. If they choose "building was inaccessible" as an option, then this clip would be a required field on the form; they can't "complete" their job without it.
Yes, there's a bit of video evidence to review. But it's very small amounts of evidence at a time, and evidence only generated in an edge-case. (At least, at game-theoretic equilibrium. There might be more evidence generated at first as workers test the water to see what they can get away with.)
You'd be right if we were talking about an iterated prisoners' dilemma (i.e. hiring the same contractors over and over.) It'd be bad management to be in an adversarial relationship with people you maintain a consistent relationship with.
But the point of Mechanical Turk is to gain a scaling advantage by designing your task as a non-iterated prisoners' dilemma (i.e. so that arbitrary new untrained people can come in and do one of your tasks once, and then not necessarily ever interact with you / your tasks again.)
This requires a very different mindset; one that not many people possess. Even most of the people who are using Mechanical Turk "successfully" don't design their tasks to actually be reliably accomplished by the firehose of arbitrary new untrained people that come through the service. Most employers on the service just use it as a temporary-worker recruiting platform — using work-sample test tasks to cull down to a set of reliable workers, and then feeding real tasks to only that pool of pre-tested workers.
But this throws away the key advantage of Mechanical Turk — the scale and elasticity to demand you get by being able to rely on "literally any human" to complete your tasks, rather than needing to be filter them down further and thus expose yourself to winnowing (which is especially harsh in the MTurk world — no worker on the service stays with it for very long, as it's one of the least marginally profitable things you can do with your time, only worth it if you have literally no better options. And most people find another option fairly quickly.)
It's not every task that can take advantage of "literally any human" — but the workloads that can are far more numerous than these tasks' designers think. They just don't understand how to create specs that stand up to an adversarial implementation.
Designing tasks for MTurk is, essentially, writing a wish for a malevolent genie, such that you can automatically verify whether you got what you wished for, and such that you can prove to the malevolent genie that that verification step is what's going to happen, such that they have no reason to defect. It's the baby brother to the AI control problem.
A good example of a well-designed MTurk task (if it were implemented as one) would be Google's older implementation of reCaptcha, the one that shows the "worker" text from books / street-view street-facing signage, and gets them to write what they see. The whole "present one known and one unknown" and "cross check inputs across several workers" parts of the design are there to allow the system to work in a non-iterated prisoners' dilemma context.
Poor objective functions can be gamed; good ones align goals such that gaming and aligned goal attainment become the same.
I'd rather face the (admittedly formidable) challenge of designing such objective functions in the open than rely on undefined or secretive policy that's hidden.
Every place I've ever worked, everyone knew who the slackers were. No assessments were necessary. It's pretty much impossible to hide incompetence from your coworkers.
I came to similar conclusion of transparency but with completely different reasoning. I see this as amazon trying to completely eliminate responsibility from supervisors and lower management. Does amazon really think they can discover new unknown faults in the business with automation alone?
Suppose I reverse engineer how the system works and find a way to steal, but have that loss attributed to different workers. How will that get discovered? how many honest workers will get fired with no recourse?
You can't replace trust with automation. You still need subjective critical thinking. If the algorithm can find the bad apples, it should be capable of producing metrics showing why they're underperforming to be reviewed by supervisor.
Why do you think that evaluation period, where there are still humans involved tweaking the system, would ever end? The world is going to keep changing. An attendance policy that everyone agreed on suddenly isn't going to work in a pandemic, and humans will need to intervene. A rating system will need to be changed when someone finds a vulnerability in the website and spams every worker with a thousand bad reviews. It's going to constantly need changes, need constant supervision and review, there will never be a point when the humans can step away and let the algorithm run the ship. It just seems like, at the absolute best, normal human management with extra steps.
You're right: continuous refinement will indeed have to continue indefinitely.
This is true with and without policy automation because policy itself has to evolve to address, as you say, a changing world, as well as the organization's changing goals and its outlook on the effectiveness of the existing policy in meeting those goals.
> The real problem comes when automated assessment is poorly designed
Using automation for worker surveillance is the least innovative employment of tech. That workplace will never be good. The thing you are correct about is that it isn't due to the technology itself.
> It's also a shame because of the lost opportunity to help workers' performance improve via feedback at a level of detail that the automated systems could provide.
Unrealistic with the one exception that you provide the info only to the specific worker. Will never work that way if that info isn't kept private.
Source: Experience of anyone that ever worked at a company where middle management must defend its existence to higher ups.
It is just a level of controlling that isn't needed. The time sink alone is a larger waste than the performance increases you net from such measures. And it really gamifies you work, so don't use it on anyone smarter than a jellyfish.
Automated policy like this will be bad until we have general purpose strong AI, because there's no room for people to be edge cases in human ways. You need to automate room for life to happen.
Automation applies policy based on it's inputs/systems.
If someone went out of their way to insure/test that it applies policy evenly, there's a decent chance it will. If not, it'll apply policy based on whatever it's inputs/systems are.
Automation is probably better than HR. And if the cost saved by not having HR can be transferred to workers, it would be a very good solution. I trust computers more than human to be honest.
Automation doesn't stop you from getting fired because the boss is having a bad day. Strong labour laws and unions stop you from being fired because the boss is having a bad day.
The only way I see capitalism surviving long-term is if we can embrace data collection in all aspects of life and make it work for us to internalize negative externalitites on an ongoing basis.
Amazon treating humans like servers. When you need to scale fast you fire up some more and when you're done you shut them down. That's basically what's happening here. Question is, are we OK with it...?
Seeing the amount of people still using Amazon I'd say as a society we are more than OK with it. Some life destroyed is worth the price of having my toilet paper sent to my home diligently.
I don't know about that. A lot of people don't know how awful they are yet. Personally I've been a very enthusiastic Amazon shopper until I started seeing the recent surge of Amazon job reviews.
It was never a big thing until a package showed up two-days after it was ordered, on a Sunday. From then on Amazon has been the Rube Goldberg-esque machine that runs on human suffering between my girlfriend and I.
While it had been mentioned in the past, it was the delivery on a Sunday that really helped drive the point home, somehow.
There are other ways of inducing reform than boycotting the company. Maybe we can pressure our politicians for better workers rights rather than worse like we've gotten over the last 4 decades.
Is it because no one is trying? Or has there been no progress on labor rights in politics for other reasons?
(My money is it's other reasons, and thus the idea of "we must pressure our political leaders! is just a feel good thing we tell ourselves because the truth is very unpleasant to acknowledge)
It's because politicians are bought and paid for by the very companies we're talking about. The only way to bring about change is to vote out the incumbent every time for 20 years I'm afraid. That's about the only pressure that will actually work. They are voting the way they do for self preservation via campaign contributions. The only way we can counter that is threaten their self preservation by voting them out every time.
Between Andrew Jackson to U.S. Grant, there were no 2 term presidents. Maybe they knew something we didn't.
While I don’t morally agree with Amazon policies, we must understand that companies will always optimize to win the capitalism’s game whatever the human cost.
However, as a society, our role is not to ask Amazon (or whatever misbehaving company) to stop being bad guys, but to change the rules of the game so that immoral behavior ceases to be a competitive advantage.
The only activist shareholders I'm aware of, like Carl Icahn are activists for themselves.
Plus, you really have to have 50% + 1 to make a difference, and then there are still mechanisms against you. You just need to come up with half of $1.74 trillion as of today, and of course enough people who want to sell.
No, I think there are more effective strategies than that.
It's only ineffective because it hasn't been tried at scale. If you can co-ordinate enough voters to move an election, you can co-ordinate enough money to influence corporate governance.
A lot of AGMs are simply rubber-stamping exercises (look at how many directors are voted in again and again with 80-95% of the vote?!) It does not have to be this way.
You don't have to literally own Amazon to change their ways - in theory you can buy one share and ask some pointed questions at the AGM. If the other shareholders see that change is in their best interest, they will vote accordingly. Sadly, most are asleep at the wheel.
> Flex drivers’ forums are littered with posts from people complaining that their accounts were terminated because their selfies did not “meet the requirements for the Amazon Flex program.” The photos appear to be verified by image recognition algorithms.
If these algorithms work better with lighter-skinned people (as has happened in the past), could they have a discrimination issue on their hands?
"The photos appear to be verified by image recognition algorithms. People who have lost weight or shaved their beards or gotten a haircut have run into problems, as have drivers attempting to start a shift at night, when low lighting can result in a poor-quality selfie."
Image recognition works great, as long as you have enough reserves that its failures don't hurt you.
Face recognition is different from face identification, which is what Amazon is attempting (and failing rather spectacularly) here. Extrapolating from one image is a doomed prospect. Ultimately, this is an example of extreme technical incompetence on Amazon"s part.
In the Cory Doctorow book "walkaways" there's this central version controlled repository that basically makes all the decisions for this commune about who should do what. Anyone can contribute to it (although AFAIR the review process wasn't too fleshed out).
Regarding Amazon, Uber and other "instant employment" type companies - it's a weird world, where you can basically get automatically hired and fired by an algorithm. It creates, in theory, full employment (although not very good employment, at least right now) and gives workers more leverage if they want to quit another job, but also more instability if the rules for the new job aren't made clear or are applied arbitrarily. It also feels like we're in a very nascent stage for this. Maybe this could be done better - it seems like an area that is ripe for disruption.
Amazon announces Elastic Firing Service. Build on years of AWS and e-commerce. You too can hire and fire your drones to adapt to the shifting realities of today's gig economy.
When I first read Mana (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1), I didn't even flinch. I knew human greed would definitely lead to this future, what I did not anticipate was its arrival in about 10 years.
Well thats not much different how they deal with their 3rd party sellers. An automated system detects “problems” and then just freezes your account, without much recourse except talking to the useless seller support that cant speak english properly and do anything about it.
In the case of being an amazon vendor (selling stuff directly to amazon in bulk), you receive orders from a computer system and if you dont deliver in the allowed timeslot they penalize you. Minimal human interaction necessary. Amazon is truly the pioneer in this type of development.
Meanwhile, they're also relentlessly sending me (and many others) ads about how great of an employer they are. I suspect that the labor shortage is going to hit Amazon the hardest here.
Yeah, there isn't a chance in hell I would work for Amazon for the foreseeable future. I have plenty of opportunity with employers who pay me to live a comfortable lifestyle and treat me well.
There is a difference between developers, who today have many options, and those who are affected.
I, as a developer, would not choose to work at Amazon because of how those who are affected are treated. That is because I have options.
I do not blame anyone who has to take a position there due to their economic position. That is not the general position of people talking here, though.
Yes, this is exactly what I intended to say. I should have said that they also need to treat other employees well too but I fell asleep shortly thereafter.
I'm not comfortable working for any company who treats any of their employees like garbage.
I hope Mr Bezos is fine if we replace the re-entry team of his spaceship with the Amazon Flex computer system. I'm sure he'll be fine if the system decides to terminate the reverse thrusters because he didn't earn a "great" rating for his re-entry vector switch flipping.
We're getting closer and closer to Manna [1] every year. Dystopian stories are meant to dissuade building the dystopia--not to encourage it! If you're a software engineer working on a project with ethical implications, please consider the kind of world you're building.
Like unions or not, the contracts they have were arrived at over decades of negotiations between companies and employees. So while many will bemoan that unions make it impossible to fire bad employees, the purpose of those provisions is to make sure that companies aren't firing workers without cause, or because of the companies' own fault, as appears to be the case here. Amazon may have stopped most of its employee unionization efforts so far, but this automated firing system looks ripe for an expensive class action lawsuit to me, and it almost certainly wouldn't have happened if these employees had the bargaining power of a group.
At-will employment is the exception, not the rule, in most of the developed world.
It's really only the US that allows employers to unilaterally terminate their employees, and there's ample evidence that companies use it as plausible cover for all sorts of actions that would be illegal (discrimination against protected groups). That, in my book, is indeed something that needs fixing.
But even beyond plausible discrimination: mutual consent is least ambiguous when there's mutual and equal power. No such balance exists in the employer-employed relationship: employees are de facto dependent on their employers for their ability to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.
If I can't be fired, then the complement to that would be I cannot quit.
There needs to be a balance where I can quit the company and the company can quit me but where companies don't abuse the system (ex Amazon in this example). I don't think there is a great solution, other than a command economy (but there you are not quite free to change "companies" either).
Is there supposed to be a catch here? If you want to quit, then you should be allowed to quit.
To make it explicit: in the vast majority of the developed world, the individual employee's autonomy is given priority. Companies still have broad discretion when it comes to firing; they're simply held to a higher standard of justification than "we don't like you anymore."
Of course you can quit. The power imbalance is mitigated in other countries by making it hard to terminate without cause and on the other side you will have to give more notice when you quit. In Germany when I lived there it wasn't uncommon to have a contract that let you quit your job with 3 months notice or even 3 months from the beginning of the next quarter, things like that. Sure that's inconvenient for some but it's a good trade-off for others.
Indeed and it's worth mentioning that when every job has that sort of notice period it's less of an issue than you might think. Not to mention there's always room for negotiation with these things.
The same termination periods for both parties, e.g. 3 months to quarters end, or month end. And you are very far from anything even remotely resembling command economy. Unless of course most of the developed free world, excluding the US, is communist command economy in your eyes.
When everyone has the same periods, they don't matter. For e declining economy, we have various forms of state sponsored half unemployment, meaning that you work less while keeping your job and the state sponsors your salary to a degree.
You can also always negotiate an earlier release. These periods offer stability for both parties.
> At-will employment is the exception, not the rule, in most of the developed world.
How does this work elsewhere in the world? From a legal point of view at-will employment seems like the default when it comes to buying a service (ie. labor). If you rent a server from amazon you can stop the rental anytime you want, and they can kick you off anytime you want.
> From a legal point of view at-will employment seems like the default when it comes to buying a service (ie. labor).
I think this gets to the heart of the difference: Americans tend to think of their employment as a continuous exchange of dollars for their labor, whereas most of the world takes the concept of an employment contract to heart.
That contract, in turn, contains both legal and contractual stipulations that prevent firing without cause: employers must give you so-and-so many weeks of notice before beginning the process of firing you, must pay you for so-and-so many months if you present an argument to a labor board, &c. There's nothing informal about it: it's the difference between continuous billing for a service and a fixed-length contract.
Here's a random PDF I found that explains some of the difference between US and French labor contracts[1].
This will depend on your views on politics/society/humanity. I know that there one side of the argument that workers should be basically hot-swappable and rack-mountable. I am often a bleeding-heart liberal and am pretty far to the other side of things. Underneath everything here it's more a question of feelings and values more than any sort of logic. Different countries' laws may come down on different sides of the argument here.
A virtualized server from Amazon does not need food, clothing, and shelter to survive. It does not have a family to support. Simply, it is not alive. and laws around humans and commodities should probably be very different.
More cold-hearted practical arguments for businesses: the virtual machine cannot vote in the next election, it cannot contact the local news media to complain about working conditions, it cannot unionize. If things get very bad it cannot buy torches and pitchforks.
Employing someone in most of the world is not seen as simply buying a service. It's not a subscription. Are you aware of the concept of Noblesse Oblige[1]? As the worker is smaller and more fragile the business can handle the burden better. The business has lots of employees whereas the employees have only one employer.
Something being widely practiced doesn't make it necessarily good or bad though. At-will being the global norm is not inherent evidence that it is productive, just, or consistent policy.
The low hanging fruit analogies are slavery, limited suffrage, and laws against homosexual civil unions, all of which were global norms at one point.
Certainly. But I think this is missing the point: the argument isn't that employment protections are good because they're widespread; the argument is that employment protections are good and their wide-spreadness is a response to a perceived need (cf. "not sure this is something that needs fixing").
The positive argument is that it's already a fixture and an agreed-upon solution in most of the developed world. The normative argument, i.e. that it's good, is in the next two paragraphs.
> This presumes that all employees are incapable of saving money or seeking alternate employment quickly.
It doesn't presume anything of the sort: you don't need to make a statement about "all" employees to observe that the average American under 35 has under $10,000 in liquid savings[1]. That can disappear pretty quickly with a car or home accident, unexpected injury, or legal liability. Even outside of those, it's not very much to live on outside of LCoL areas for more than a couple of months.
The average American is also not a tech worker: they're somewhere in the lower middle class, and may or may not have the ability to transition rapidly between jobs (our current funhouse-mirror economy aside). You're making extraordinary presumptions about millions of people, presumptions with very real and material consequences.
But to go even further: we should not be punishing people with the threat of hunger or exposure for failing to keep liquid savings! The current economy doesn't encourage liquid (i.e., conservative) saving techniques, and American education does not consistently include financial planning. The vast majority of Americans are blamelessly "winging it" and should not be punished for that.
To tie a bow around it: I don't need to make a universal statement about every employee in America to correctly observe that many employees are materially threatened by at-will employment. Attempting to promote this into universal claims is bewildering at best; it's immediately obvious to everyone that plenty of people can survive an unexpected firing.
My dad, career Air Force, was once given the job of coaching the privates on the Air Force base. It seems that about 50% of them were unable to pay their bills, which caused friction between the base commander and the local merchants.
The privates were all paid the same, every two weeks.
Half were able to pay their bills and did well. The other half would spend their paychecks as fast as possible, and would run out of money after 1 week. The 2nd week was spent begging, borrowing, and in general being a deadbeat.
My dad would sit down with them, go over their spending, and prepare budgets for them. Literally none of them were able to adhere to those budgets.
You are assuming they are being terminated after a correct assessment if their value. Good employees still get fired. Managers can be wrong, or play office politics.
You say "obvious", but in the real world, the lines of net positive or negative have more inputs than that.
Adding an algorithm to the mix that may or may not be operating correctly is not a human way to operate.
In civilization, we make affordances for people that go against the razors edge of pure efficiency.
Because you’re talking about people who don’t have extensive cybersec experience and multiple retirement accounts, who see a job as the thing, you know, feeding their kids for the next two weeks while we pontificate on their purpose as a class on HN? This comment is extremely tone deaf and betrays why this industry is fundamentally flawed when it comes to human factors. Engineers and product leads building these systems have simply never experienced the other end of the table, and then reduce the equation to a “business relationship” just like you’re doing here.
I realize it’s easy to forget you’re discussing human beings when computers make much more sense. I don’t know, call me crazy, European, idealistic, whatever, but putting a human in the loop to say “eh, that’s a bad call” isn’t a lot to ask nor the demise of capitalism. If a human being double checking and delivering bad news is the only thing holding the economy back from grand designs of glorious, automated scale, I’d prefer another economy that pays more attention to its purpose - which is the sustenance of humans, not the concentration of wealth based on flagrant disregard for the welfare of people it serves.
I like the way Sorkin put it: “we used to wage war on poverty, not poor people,” and I think your initial question about empathy illuminates much of that sentiment.
> Because you’re talking about people who don’t have extensive cybersec experience and multiple retirement accounts, who see a job as the thing, you know, feeding their kids for the next two weeks while we pontificate on their purpose as a class on HN?
This strikes me as ad hominem; I'm talking about standard unskilled workers. Anyone who doesn't have enough savings on hand to buy food and shelter for the short period of time while switching jobs in one of the best labor markets for workers that our generation has ever seen is simply irresponsible.
There are so many unfilled jobs right now.
> I realize it’s easy to forget you’re discussing human beings when computers make much more sense
Oh, come on. We're talking about consent to a business transaction between human beings here, obviously. Please do try to comment in good faith.
Seriously, though, what the fuck is a “standard unskilled worker?” Did that sound like anything but a reductive take on people less privileged than you in your head? At the least it’s a further elimination of empathy and human factors from your point. I didn’t think there was much left to discard, but here we are, with the lower social strata in an Excel column.
Luckily for us, I’m not debating you and need not concern myself with whatever you’d like to call the argument. I’m simply appealing to whatever sliver of empathy you have to consider that just maybe firing someone with a batch job is a good place to think about an ethical line. I didn’t even advocate to draw one, just introduced nuance to think about as a counterweight to your extraordinarily simplistic view of labor and its role in society.
If you can’t meet me even there and instead take an opportunity to call people who just might starve to death on the other end of such an experience “irresponsible,” based on ostensibly a distant understanding of finance and employment for lower social classes, we are not going to agree on anything. The ad hominem would be noting that from your views it reads like you have next to no experience with the financial circumstances you’re discussing, which given the topic seems an interesting but unnecessarily personal observation.
If these comments are in bad faith in this forum then I have absolutely no interest in baptizing my views.
Honestly, I’d be curious how your interview at Dominos would go. I’m not being snide. You should take a break from this line of work and go after the so many unfilled jobs you’re talking about for a while, because I think it would refine your viewpoint on this (speaking from personal experience). You know how one can interview for a cybersec gig and disclose that they were fired once for some bullshit and everyone shares a good laugh about the story while cutting an offer letter? That doesn’t happen at Dominos.
Welcome to HN and your comments are not in bad faith at all.
Some views here are very ‘boolean’ and lack nuance... presented as simplifying complex matters. But it’s rather a simplistic mode of thinking, which reduces our lives to lives devoid of empathy. This mode of thinking also tends to see ‘working class’ folks who can’t manage their finances as folks who simply lack character.
In the words of Rutger Bregman... poverty isn’t a lack of character, it’s a lack of cash (recommended read: his book ‘Utopia for Realists’)
And don’t forget, what this pandemic has showed us is that lots of working class folks really are essential workers.
Yes, there are some folks who are lazy, but you find that in all sectors.
Letting simple algorithms designed by folks with a very ‘boolean’ worldview determine who is worthy of employment (survival) and who is not leads us to world as illustrated in the movie Elysium.
Feels like this sums up so much of our world, it's scary. Anyway.
Main issue is with "mutual consent", or more specifically, negotiating power.
A contract negotiated between two parties with similar amounts of power will have terms that protect both sides. These will often define things like advance notice for cancellation, or penalties for early cancellation. The paying party usually wants the most flexibility for cancellation, the counterparty wants certainty of revenue, so a balance is found. Assuming everyone did their work, both sides should be reasonably happy with the terms of the contract.
A negotiation between a large corporation and an individual (low-level) employee is not really a negotiation, the individual employee can only accept or reject the corporation's offer but they cannot typically negotiate specific parts of the contract. Individually, they have no leverage. If they decline the offer and move on to the next company, they don't have any more negotiating power over there either.
Let's also talk about BATNA a bit here. BATNA for a company: they just hire the next person that comes along, still with the terms dictated by the company. BATNA for an employee: accept an offer somewhere else (again with the terms dictated by the company), or starve.
So what can an individual employee do to get more leverage and get an outcome closer to a "mutual consent" contract? Well, the obvious option is to coordinate their negotiation with others who also have low individual negotiating power but share similar interests. Combined, they should have a lot more leverage.
We could call this negotiating process "collective bargaining", and the group of individuals a "union".
The market-driven counter to this is that if companies don't offer terms that employees agree to, they won't be able to get any employees and therefore over time, in the aggregate, they will move towards outcomes similar to what would be achieved in a mutual consent arrangement, without the need for unions.
Of course if that was correct we likely would not have seen the rise of unions in the first place because things would simply have adjusted over the many decades if industrial revolution leading up to wide scale establishment of labor unions. When it comes down to being able to survive, people will accept the terms they're given. They don't have the luxury of waiting for a "market correction" on labor rates and benefits.
Open markets can find efficient solutions to complex problems. Unfortunately, much like waiting for evolution to find a solution for a problem, it doesn't always happen at a time scale suitable for human lifetimes.
You do have to admit, Amazon has reduced the number of options you can have for employment. Last I checked, toys r us ain't hiring, cause Amazon ships the toys now.
It wasn't Amazon's fault; Toy stores had been declining well before it, with companies like KB toys going defunct in 2009. In general what was happening was that it was much harder for retail speciality stores and small chains to compete with Wal-mart and other megastores, and the market seemed to collapse.
A tremendous amount of retail just died in the 2000s, with only a few survivors. Either folding, or being bought out and merging with other companies that folded.
That’s a lot like saying it was the patient’s underlying cancer that ultimately killed her, not the pillow held over her face by an overly ambitious family member eyeing the lucrative estate she would leave behind.
Amazon accelerated what you describe in every quantifiable way and it was undoubtedly baked into the overall strategy. Yes, the situation was already terminal thanks to the Internet and poor online shopping execution by the incumbents, including Walmart, but overlooking Amazon’s involvement (going so far as to call it not their fault) and pointing at Walmart as the disease itself is a tiny bit of revisionism.
Am I the only one old enough to remember discussions in older forums like these about how brilliant Bezos was to identify and exploit such a now-obvious opportunity? It was obvious then to the point of being damned near Amazon’s entire thesis.
I'm curious, why did all the "old guard" absolutely refuse online? Blockbuster, KB, Toysrus - these were all before my time, but did they just think oh no, we don't ever have to bother with this, people will always come in the store?
Toy R Us went bankrupt in large part due to executives selling itself to a private capitol firm that saddled it with so much debt that even with its stores maintaining decent operating profits the company as a whole could not maintain the debt payments.
Amazon certainly didn't help their bottom line, but it wasn't the nail in the coffin either.
Walmart delivers groceries to my door and lets me tip the driver in the app, have they similarly limited employment opportunities or do they expand them?
I’m not sure at this point, both are horrible corporations I’ve resisted as long as I can can, yet both regularly siphon money from my checking account.
Why would anyone want to continue in a business relationship where the other party doesn't want to?
Because people arrange their lives around their work situation and it can be significantly damaging to them to lose their jobs due to a bad manager or, as in this post's example, a flawed algorithm.
That's why welfare, food assistance programs, and unemployment exist. Amazon (and every other employer) pays in to those programs by law when employing people.
And the CEOs or their lobbyists go to state and federal capitols to lobby for destruction of these programs, or "donate" to politicians' election campaigns with "wink wink, you know what we want."...
Are you looking for hypotheticals? Maybe a person has no financial safety net and has a sick family member at home that requires all of their time outside of work, leaving none for a job search.
So, for starters, what is described in the article (and maybe even the post your responded to) is not really a termination without cause, it is a termination for cause.
If you have a policy you require of your employees("You must take a picture of yourself"), and you terminate the employee for not doing it, that is not a without-cause termination.
That is a termination for-cause - the cause being the violation of the policy.
Termination without cause would basically be "we are downsizing, you are no longer needed".
The rules about "without-cause" are pretty consistent state to state.
However, the rules on "with cause" vary state to state. In a lot of states, you can't terminate someone for violating a policy if they didn't violate it. These policies are a form of "implied contract".
In other states, the employer can act completely and totally arbitrarily, as long as it is not acting illegally.
Ever tried to cancel your phone contract?
Cancelation at anytime is the exception not the norm. Same with most contracts, they all have notice periods.
>What am I missing?
People have obligations like rent, health insurance, school fees.
They have families and children, so a minimum of planning is important.
Everything else is inhumane.
They're not employees, they're contractors. Meaning the relationship is governed by a contract. If a system that Amazon knows to be flawed is being used to terminate contracts incorrectly then it is a contractual issue.
Contract law requires good faith execution of the contract. It is not good faith to terminate contracts using a known bad system.
I'm not sure but was always under the impression at-will employment is essentially that. The employer and employee maintain an agreement that either party can terminate at any point in time. Is that not the right interpretation of at-will employment?
Contractors get protections afforded under established contract law and principals of executing a contract in good faith. If Amazon has built a system that they know to be inconsistent or unfair or otherwise flawed then they are violating the terms of the contract.
So let's say I have a startup that uses 10 different SaaS providers. Suppose I decided one day to randomly pick one SaaS provider and stop using them. That sounds "inconsistent or unfair or otherwise flawed" to me. Would that get me in trouble?
Depends on the terms of the contract. Contracts must be executed in good faith. That is the law. If you with your SaaS vendors or Amazon with its Flex workers isn't conforming to that part of the law then there is the potential for legal liability.
And a automatic metrics based firing system is probably much fairer than a human. Hard to sue for discrimination when you can prove with code it was based on metrics.
Actually, it will be easier to show any labor law violations with an automated system. Any kind of wrongful termination or bias will be easy to show in the logs.
Note that getting a computer to do something doesn't make it unbiased. People can, and often do, write bias into programs.
And easy to prove when you can show a correlation like the employee being black results in being downrated. Code and especially machine learning systems happily encode our own biases.
Question is, according to whom. For example, Uber got hit with a pretty big fine in Italy because in the view of the court, the people working for Uber should be viewed as employees.
I wonder how much these causes are for worker's rights vs some politician trying to win a popularity contest by bashing these "evil tech foreign giants".
But I know nothing about pre-Uber Italian taxi regulations.
Presumably, it's in the contract and the contract is iron-clad.
Many years ago, I had a friend who was questioning a lawyer about a general indemnity clause in a contract. The lawyer said, "Don't worry about it too much. The courts don't like it when someone tries to take away your ability to seek legal satisfaction." I guess that has changed.
That may very well be the case. Companies tend to put all sorts of things into contracts that courts would never enforce. It pays because people believe the contract is valid and abide by it.
This sounds wildly illegal. I don't know the laws on different states, but do none of them require a reason for termination? Seems ridiculous. If they are using facial recognition are they also making systematic racist or other illegal 'decisions' when firing?
Most states in the US have at-will employment, which means the employee or employer can terminate employment at any time for any reason (other than some carved-out exceptions) or no reason at all.
Fair. I was hedging because I was too lazy to look it up and confirm there are no exceptions. "Every state makes their own rules" can create weird situations and I didn't want to mislead anyone....
"At-will" employment does not sound like it would apply here. While searching for this, I found a quote "At-will does not apply if there has been a breach of good faith by the employer." This is clearly a breach of good faith. I do not think these firings are legal based on my admittedly weak understanding of the issue.
Good faith is a lower bar than you think it is. Basically you can't screw someone over by firing them.
"Examples of bad faith terminations include an employer firing an older employee to avoid paying retirement benefits or terminating a salesman just before a large commission on a completed sale is payable. There have been relatively few cases in which employers were found liable under an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing theory."
Being fired by an opaque, capricious algorithm is not bad faith. It's likely more legally sound for Amazon than firing someone the "old fashioned way"—There's no potential for personal biases to get in the way, and I'm sure the software squirrels away all the necessary documentation should a wrongful termination suit arise.
> Basically you can't screw someone over by firing them.
Every person in the article seems like they were screwed over when they were fired. All of them.
> Being fired by an opaque, capricious algorithm is not bad faith.
Yes, it is. When the 'algorithm' is already known by executives to make horrible mistakes, it definitely is.
From the article: “Executives knew this was gonna shit the bed,”
> There's no potential for personal biases to get in the way,
I do not agree with this at all. Someone - people - wrote the code that they use to do the firings. Just because a 'computer' took the steps does not mean that there is "no potential" for personal biases to get in the way. In fact there is unlimited potential for that, and it's sneaky, because you can just blame the software!
> and I'm sure the software squirrels away all the necessary documentation should a wrongful termination suit arise.
Are you really sure about this? Why are you so sure? I personally would be confident that it does not do that. If it did, wouldn't it be possible for it to not make these decisions in the first place?
> Being fired by an opaque, capricious algorithm is not bad faith. It's likely more legally sound for Amazon than firing someone the "old fashioned way"—There's no potential for personal biases to get in the way, and I'm sure the software squirrels away all the necessary documentation should a wrongful termination suit arise.
Given the well-known problems with computer vision and race (and the lighting-related problems this have which have similar source), I’d be very surprised if this didn't constitute disparate impact racial discrimination if someone actually did the legwork to gather the relevant data.
Really? Hiring someone who starts working a night shift, and then firing them because they look different during the day time is not a breach of good faith? Firing someone for shaving their beard is not a breach of good faith?
I guess I need to read up on legal terms. How are these obvious problems not breaches of good faith? I can admit I don't know much here, but, I'm shocked to find out that none of the examples in the article are considered "even close to" a breach of good faith?!
What would it take for Amazon to fire someone and breach the assumed good faith? Do you have an example? I'm curious and honestly trying to learn. I googled this obviously but since I'm not a legal expert the results are iffy and can be difficult to interpret so I appreciate the conversation on this, cheers.
There would have to be some sort of misleading, lies, broken promises or malicious intent to cause harm.
It would be a breach of good faith if you say to the employee that shaving your beard is okay when they ask but then fire them for it because akshually paragraph 113.5 of your employee handbook prohibits beards. If you did not say anything like that, then the default conditions apply, and in an at-will employment state firing someone because you don't like their face (for example, after they have shaved) is not prohibited.
If you explicitly say every now and then "we may arbitrarily terminate you" and then actually do terminate people for arbitrary reasons (for example, fire everyone whose name starts with 'F' or employee ID ends with '13'), that's not a breach of good faith, as you're not breaking any promises, neither explicit or implied, you're doing exactly as you warned them you may do.
I recently accepted a 30 day delivery delay to avoid buying some items off Amazon. I got anxiety from trying to buy from Amazon and couldn’t do it, 2 day shipping or not. The company is a nightmare
I find myself ordering less and less from Amazon. For almost any product now there are tons of foreign "brands" with random all caps names that are whitelabeling products with questionable quality. With no oversight, if anything goes wrong, doesn't conform to safety regulations, etc, they can easily just go and set up shop under a different name.
Don’t forget how they also remove and re-list items all the time to avoid bad reviews, and copy/paste reviews and ratings from other unrelated products. I’m guessing that it’s worth it to pay people in call center type operations pennies per review to do this if the bot detection is usually good enough to catch it, or if they’re doing the “verified buyer” thing, to pay people to “buy” their products, etc etc. The point is that what Amazon does to try to stop this isn’t working, and Amazon feels like a flea market with a few “official” stores. The categories and requirement to pick a category before getting more advanced parameters has been broken for years, and I doubt anyone in power there is very interested in fixing it.
I’ve also been buying less on Amazon, but their easy returns if something arrives truly broken or mismatched from the description are a lot more peace of mind than one typically gets with random small businesses. I’ve had to file a chargeback before after a small biz refused to let me cancel an order after informing me after charging me that one thing I ordered was no longer available in the configuration I ordered it (auto parts so it literally wouldn’t have worked). It was a huge hassle and a few hours of wasted time, plus I still had to find the hard-to-source part somewhere else. On Amazon I’ve been refunded immediately, no questions asked, when I’ve been sent the wrong thing. I’m sure that people who return stuff at a higher rate are super annoying for merchants with how Amazon puts seemingly all of the burden on them, but for consumers who mostly buy stuff in good faith (e.g. not buying a tool to use it then return it when done), it’s a great experience. I’m sure they have metrics on customers around how much they return and what that “free shipping” really costs.
What is the deal with those weird names? I have a lamp called the "Deunbr". Maybe there's an AI creating Amazon shops and randomizing the name every time
Good for you. I try to as often as I can, not that it makes a difference though. I also definitely try to buy more things locally but sometimes Amazon is just by far the cheapest plus fastest option.
If you want to see very clear examples of ridiculous Amazon pricing, just look up boxes of nitrile gloves. Found some in stock at Target last week for about 2x what I’d expect them to cost normally, yet on Amazon they’re all about 10x normal prices. I really like the longer gloves in larger thicknesses for working on mechanical stuff, but I’m not paying $1/pair for disposable nitrile gloves.
Did the same, ordered an orchid title (publisher in US this time), the publisher offered 20 % discount on Amazon's price without even asking. The conditions that Amazon offers to their sellers must be truly dreadful.
Fascinating tech. imagine if human element is removed from critical decision making, meaning bias is drastically reduced (if not completely eliminated in this case). All decisions are strictly based on your output which eliminates corruption, nepotism, and unfairness. Isn't this system better that what we have now (flawed and unpredictable humans driving critical decisions)?
Yes, they highlight transparency issues which is the problem. When using a tech like this objectives must be clear, workers should know the system and know the expectations and productivity criteria
> Fascinating tech. imagine if human element is removed from critical decision making, meaning bias is drastically reduced (if not completely eliminated in this case)
I mean, we can get a more real example easily. Amazon had an AI recruiting tool that was biased against women. The explanation is very simple, the training dataset of successful hires mostly consisted of males so the AI though nothing better than penalizing women.
The question is, how do you detect such a bias, and how do you prevent it in the first place? We have some ideas when it comes to humans, but for code it's much more challenging.
I feel like this is a very disingenuous way to put this issue. It's not that people write a program that actually have lines of code like this in them but rather machine learning algorithms operate on our current reality rather than any ideal. With few exceptions a pregnant employee is worse than a non pregnant one so if all employee data is fed into a nice ML black box with all things being equal it's going to start firing the pregnant ones.
And then an engineer has to correct it by determining the weight of pregnancies in general. Some will call it fixed, some will call it stupid. The latter one is far more correct though.
algorithm could not be based on that. what you described is highly personal and doesn't make sense when optimizing for profits. When optimizing for profits all that matters is value created/delivered (or loss reduced, risks averted).
One can speculate about possible (and/or highly personal) correlations while not realizing that the outcome is completely fair.
> algorithm could not be based on that. what you described is highly personal and doesn't make sense when optimizing for profits.
That's irrelevant. My point is that no bias is eliminated at first place, since the algorithm is still man made. You could argue that since there is no human intervention the same input would lead to the same output, but again, neither you or I have read the code to claim that it is somehow "bias free" or even completely deterministic, especially if the input relies on computer vision.
1. "no bias is eliminated at first place, since the algorithm is still man made" -
This is a straw man. if specific criteria are being automatically evaluated bias is most certainly reduced (if not eliminated).
2. "especially if the input relies on computer vision" - evaluation criteria can be infinitely improved upon
3. "neither you or I have read the code" -
I highlighted transparency concerns in my original comment
4. Unavoidable, unintentional implementation flaws (bugs) are expected but so are fixes and continuous improvements.
I would certainly trust an algorithm to make a decision about my employment over an unpredictable, flawed, and (often times) incompetent human management
