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[TheShadowLord]

Amazon used an AI to automatically fire low-productivity workers

"Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity."

futurism.com

This time, artificial intelligence is literally taking jobs.

Documents obtained by The Verge show how Amazon used a computer system to automatically track and fire hundreds of fulfillment center employees between for failing to meet productivity quotas — a grim glimpse of a future in which AI is your boss.

While not every decision was made by a computer system, the documents — including a signed letter by an Amazon attorney describing the system — reveal how deeply automated the process really is. It’s not clear whether Amazon is still using the system.

“Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity,” reads the letter as quoted by The Verge, “and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.”


Boss Machine
After this story ran, Amazon spokesperson Ashley Robinson reached out with a statement that pushed back against The Verge‘s reporting — but failed to provide specific examples of inaccuracies.

“Similar to many companies, we have performance expectations regardless of whether they are corporate or fulfillment center employees,” read the statement. “We support people who do not perform to the levels expected of them with dedicated coaching to help them improve and be successful in their career at Amazon. We would never dismiss an employee without first ensuring that they had received our fullest support, including dedicated coaching to help them improve and additional training. Since we’re a company that continues to grow, it’s our business objective to ensure long-term career development opportunities for our employees.”


Zero History
Regardless, Amazon’s fulfillment centers have seen a lot of automation over the past decade. A complex system of warehouse robots have been replacing jobs — while also sometimes creating new ones.

Working conditions are infamously terrible at the online retailer: an anonymous employee wrote for the Guardian last year about unusually strenuous demands the company places on its warehouse workers.

“Through the use of digital trackers and indicators, our workday is managed down to the second,” the op-ed read.

But the automated tracking-and-firing system sounds even more egregious — placing power over employment in the hands of an AI that tracks invasive details like the amount of time employees spend “off task.”


“One of the things that we hear consistently from workers is that they are treated like robots in effect because they’re monitored and supervised by these automated systems,” Amazon critic Stacy Mitchell told The Verge. “They’re monitored and supervised by robots.”

 

[Joyful]

thats pretty terrifying

 

[StreetsofBeige]

It sounds bad because AI is being used in the mix.

Productivity performance has been tracked for decades, it's just that Amazon's name makes it a headline.

For example, Costco checkout people get rated on how fast they complete a customer's shopping cart of stuff. That's why they do it so fast, while a cash register worker at every other place might take their time.

A long time ago when I did admin work processing people's RRSP applications, I got rated on accuracy. I'd literally get scorecards on how many I did and how accurate I input the person's data into the system in some boring a fuck UNIX green font data program..... have fun staring at those ugly green screens all day.

So there someone tracking my input accuracy to tell me how good it was, and to fix mistakes.

It's all about performance. People who don't like this are likely slackers who want to coast, collect a pay cheque and hope no boss bothers asks them to improve.

 

[Tesseract]

there is a point where productivity becomes exploitative, it's absolute shit that working conditions are this way in america

 

[triplestation]

Let jobless people starve and live shit lives until they decay out of existence. There should be about 500 thousand people alive and they should all live flawlessly. 200 thousand of them the best scientists/engineers. The rest attractive celebrities and entertainers.

90% of the country should be robots working at 100% efficiency to make the 500 thousand feel on top of the world.

 

[Slings and Arrows]

People are not digital 1's and 0's. Everybody is different and excels at a different task. Until the industrialised nations understand this, productivity and outpout will never reach its' true potential.

in most organisations 90% of the back office staff could be replaced by machines. But instead they use these machines to only track workers on the shop floor, leading to poor and unproductive working environments.

The CEO's who chase productivity are really missing out on billions of dollars worth of profit and it makes me frustrated that they can't see it.

 

[HarryKS]

I thought Bezos was aligned with the left and liked the Dems and cared for the people. Oh my.

Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

This isn't unusual. It's hard to fire someone for "performance issues" in fast-moving industries because often you don't have a codified set of policies that describe with exactitude what a person is expected to do. Lazy managers put the burden on their employees to figure that out, but on the flip side it makes it significantly more difficult to fire someone who abuses that sort of system.

I had to fire such an employee a month ago. We had been documenting their bad performance for over 12 months, but HR kept telling us to document more. Finally we obtained "enough" documentation, write-ups, etc for HR to give us the green light.

Behind the scenes, though, this person had been with the company long enough to have some sympathetic friends in high places, which is why they were able to hang on for years by doing the minimum effort.

Good managers are difficult to come by. AI is being used for hiring and firing because no company wants the liability of being "biased" or "bigoted" for whatever random identity bullet-point the ex-employee wants to use as an excuse. A good manager can detail why a person was fired and stick by their decision. Bad managers avoid firing because it's uncomfortable/confrontational. Relying on AI will stupefy us and make corporate culture even worse (if that was possible) but at least it solves a short-term problem.

 

[Musky_Cheese]

Sounds pretty efficient honestly.

 

[Winter John]

Amazon's been doing this for years. The scanners we carried tracked our speed and movement. If you stopped for longer than 2 minutes it'd alert your team leader and he'd be waiting for you when you got back. I was pretty fit when I started but my feet hurt like a bitch after a couple of days. Them scanners showed how much you'd walked on your shift and it was usually around 24 kilometres. That don't sound too bad but that was going at speed and it was constant. I wasn't taking gentle strolls around the warehouse admiring the view. The thing is, if you just come out of jail Amazon's one of the few places that'll hire you. So they know they can do whatever they like and the workers will put up with it cos they don't have any other options.

 

[lock2k]

Let jobless people starve and live shit lives until they decay out of existence. There should be about 500 thousand people alive and they should all live flawlessly. 200 thousand of them the best scientists/engineers. The rest attractive celebrities and entertainers.

90% of the country should be robots working at 100% efficiency to make the 500 thousand feel on top of the world.

You have a great movie script there.

 

[Vicetrailia]

Nothing wrong with this.

They're pretty efficient to a point of being overbearing, and their reputation will take a hit making it harder to recruit people. But they're starting wages are better now, but they have a bad reputation. So who knows.

 

[Torrent of Pork]

Every large warehouse in the country operates effectively the same way. When I was pulling orders for Publix if you pulled at less than 80% after your training period it was an automatic write-up. 4 write-ups in a rolling 6 month period meant automatic termination.

If you can't cut it, there's a line of people behind you who can.

 

[Vicetrailia]

Every large warehouse in the country operates effectively the same way. When I was pulling orders for Publix if you pulled at less than 80% after your training period it was an automatic write-up. 4 write-ups in a rolling 6 month period meant automatic termination.

If you can't cut it, there's a line of people behind you who can.

80% performance right?

 

[Torrent of Pork]

80% performance right?

Yes, pulling at 100% is considered baseline acceptable performance. You're only allowed to pull less than 80% during your 3 month training period. Most people pull much faster though, since at Publix your hourly wage rate determined by your pull speed averaged over the last 16 weeks.

I knew one kid who dropped out of high school, and was making over 50k per year just on labor. The weirdest thing is that he didn't even work that hard, he just had a savant-level ability to never touch a box twice.

 

[Vicetrailia]

Yes, pulling at 100% is considered baseline acceptable performance. You're only allowed to pull less than 80% during your 3 month training period. Most people pull much faster though, since at Publix your hourly wage rate determined by your pull speed averaged over the last 16 weeks.

I knew one kid who dropped out of high school, and was making over 50k per year just on labor. The weirdest thing is that he didn't even work that hard, he just had a savant-level ability to never touch a box twice.

Oh okay, gotcha.

 

[SLoWMoTIoN]

Where can I apply to work as an AI?

 

[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

Jeff Bozos needs to be stopped.

 

[Panda1]

there is a point where productivity becomes exploitative, it's absolute shit that working conditions are this way in america

i take it you dont use Amazon then. Bitching about it whist using it would be well..

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Every company works different. Aside from my office job processing applications, I've never worked FT doing warehouse/productivity work (I'm not going to include some shitty summer jobs I had).

But every department has different ways of tracking performance. Blue collar kinds of jobs are more trackable as it's based on movement/processing of orders. It's more consistent what you do.

A pure office job like mine doing accounting/finance is totally different. It's impossible to track a person's performance that way since assignment A, B and C are totally different taking different time to finish.

But for all the bitching, office jobs aren't cozy either. Most office people have no union to fall back on, and all it takes is one screw up and you can be toast. This is especially true of the sales team. You miss your sales goal for the year, and a half decent chance.... buh-bye. All it takes if fucking up one good deal, and that might be enough for the boss/HR to fire you. I've seen sales guys fired after 6 months because they couldn't hack it.

I don't know about training in blue collar jobs, but in every office I've worked at there's almost no training either. They just throw you in, assume you can handle taking over the last person's files and you're basically on your own. Coworkers will help you use a new computer program and give you pointers on people to know, but work wise, you sit at the desk and figure it out yourself.

 

[Panda1]

would u not rather an AI than a human who is going to be sexist/racist/biased in some way?

 

[triplestation]

You have a great movie script there.

The movie ends with the 500 thousand killing each other out of small scale social conflicts and the natural human need for war. Some of the engineers secretly built killing machines for their own protection. Only a few survive in the hundreds. They're tasked to rebuild society but fail because there is no trust and they lose sanity. The final scene is of the worker robots incessantly continuing their process.

 

[Sqorin Hammerfarf]

It turns out, SkyNet won't be using terminators to destroy humanity, it's just going to kill them by forcing them to work on Saturdays.

 

[Fox Mulder]

An AI could be the best way in theory, as they don't have friends or other biases that any human managers will. It's purely based on your performance.

 

[norinrad]

Amazon is like the Tyrell corporation? Who knew?

 

[n0razi]

would u not rather an AI than a human who is going to be sexist/racist/biased in some way?

Unless the AI was programmed with sexist/racist/biased parameters

 

[ipukespiders]

Next up: NeoGAF owner uses AI to ban unworthy members

 

[EverydayBeast]

It’s gonna be robots firing other robots

 

[TheShadowLord]

An AI could be the best way in theory, as they don't have friends or other biases that any human managers will. It's purely based on your performance.

Not really since robots cannot think for themselves. They are being fed the existing data we already have https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/10/ama...ting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women.html

 

[SLoWMoTIoN]

An AI could be the best way in theory, as they don't have friends or other biases that any human managers will. It's purely based on your performance.

Unless somebody fucks with the stats.

 

[Punished Miku]

Spend your money at places besides Amazon.

 

[JSoup]

But for all the bitching, office jobs aren't cozy either. Most office people have no union to fall back on, and all it takes is one screw up and you can be toast. This is especially true of the sales team. You miss your sales goal for the year, and a half decent chance.... buh-bye. All it takes if fucking up one good deal, and that might be enough for the boss/HR to fire you. I've seen sales guys fired after 6 months because they couldn't hack it.

It also depends on what kind of office. I have a friend who works for the state. When you're hired, you have a one year probationary period where you can and will be fired for minor fuck ups. Make it past that point, and they hand you an actual work contract that flat out states you can't be fired for anything short of a felony. He could literally just dick around all day if he wanted and they still have to pay him because "spotting this behavior is what the probation period is for, if they thought it might happen, they should have said something then".

 

[godhandiscen]

Some measure of technology to track the output of employees is required these days. The problem is not the AI, but the exploitative standard perhaps. Nevertheless, they can now catch you if you slack all day looking at forums or social media, which is fair. The day of taking the piss on low wage jobs is over.

 

[Winter John]

Every company works different. Aside from my office job processing applications, I've never worked FT doing warehouse/productivity work (I'm not going to include some shitty summer jobs I had).

But every department has different ways of tracking performance. Blue collar kinds of jobs are more trackable as it's based on movement/processing of orders. It's more consistent what you do.

A pure office job like mine doing accounting/finance is totally different. It's impossible to track a person's performance that way since assignment A, B and C are totally different taking different time to finish.

But for all the bitching, office jobs aren't cozy either. Most office people have no union to fall back on, and all it takes is one screw up and you can be toast. This is especially true of the sales team. You miss your sales goal for the year, and a half decent chance.... buh-bye. All it takes if fucking up one good deal, and that might be enough for the boss/HR to fire you. I've seen sales guys fired after 6 months because they couldn't hack it.

I don't know about training in blue collar jobs, but in every office I've worked at there's almost no training either. They just throw you in, assume you can handle taking over the last person's files and you're basically on your own. Coworkers will help you use a new computer program and give you pointers on people to know, but work wise, you sit at the desk and figure it out yourself.

"For all the bitching." You should try working in an Amazon warehouse. I guarantee a few shifts in one of them and you won't be so dismissive of the poor working conditions.

 

[Tapioca]

Pretty much any major warehouse uses an algorithm that sets the rate that employees pick at. Then they hang the rates up on the wall so that all the employees can see if you are failing or not.

Warehouses are kind of hellish. The one auto parts warehouse I worked at expected you to run while picking orders. Then after you ran around all day, go stock heavy ass semi parts at an extremely fast pace. It was like 120 degrees in the summer. It felt like you were slowly being roasted alive. Then they wanted you to come in on Saturdays half of the time. Miserable....just miserable.

The retention rate was awful. I'd say 90% of people quit in their first two weeks.

Pay was $12.00 an hr, part time.

Physically it gave me the best ass I'd ever have. But it started to slowly deteriorate other parts of my body. I got tennis elbow and my knee started to give me problems. Carpel Tunnel from holding a rfid scanner all day. Being a work horse like that slowly destroys you. I don't work there anymore and now I have no problems.

Having a shitty job motivated me to go back to college.