Amazon uses AI to monitor union risk in UK warehouses | Hacker News Reader

Amazon uses AI to monitor union risk in UK warehouses

opendemocracy.net

173 pointsDeepLogin61 comments

There is no form of surveillance that does more good than harm in the long run. The endless debates about the value of "catching bad guys" or "keeping people on their best behavior" should be rightly seen as opposed to the fundamental notion that human beings are capable of cooperation and altruism at scale. No amount of mass surveillance is justifiable, and there is no version of the future in which we allow it but do not create dystopia

I'm okay with the idea of some asymmetry. You need to pay to look up my stuff, but once you do, I get access to yours for free.

I disagree, I want all of my decision-making government employees monitored and logged 24/7 complete with a peeping tom AI to sort the recordings by suspiciousness and performance with accurate potentially large bonuses on large time delays.

And you're willing to subject yourself to such monitoring as well, right?

If he has any power over other people than may be this might be required?

Irrelevant. Public servants are to be held to a higher standard.

Does this include organizations accepting public funds in any way, shape, or form? Where do inalienable rights begin and your fetish for catching people taking too long to shit end?

Not enough room here to write out the manifesto but in short: it depends on the stakes and on how secure you can monitor the data. In general we never have enough resources, if we have just a little bit more more people will live [longer] and lives may be improved. A little bit of corruption will only ruin a few lives. A good scheme will kill millions. That they get away with it is not even half the problem, you end up encouraging repetition and eventually end up normalizing it. Securing the data properly is important or people become afraid to act when they should.

If you catch them early enough you might not even persecute, if the members of the organization act suspicious enough the next contract could go to someone else or you might discontinue on the spot. When someone proposes the bribe you get a notification that your employment is under review.

People tasked with enforcement can go straight to prison when they fail to arrange your hearing or your day in court.

Earnings to match the working conditions of course and the conditions should be clear from day one.

Of course!

I don't know how hard you work but assuming you enjoy accomplishing something, did you ever have a job where a substantial % of the employees are trying to cut all corners?

In my current job, for two months, two employees have been to lazy to drive 2 hours to bring tools. People working there will simply not do the work. They won't report it to higher ups because the first question will be: Why didn't you report this two months ago? I grind them every day but wont report them either as there is nothing to gain for me.

This is exactly how governments works.

I wrote a web app, I put some screenshots into an LLM and instantly know who isn't working, for how long or at what point they cant continue and how long ago they should have known. It paints a preposterous picture but it is currently only useful for job security.

Elected and unelected government workers impact not just us but the world given the interconnected nature of modern logistics.

They can accept the obligation or stay home.

It's not supposed to be career for personal gain like being an actor. Every LARP has been socialized as a "destiny" or "calling".

Except for the average person who lives at the whims of "the market".

The downside for the majority of insulating 600k elected officials and the 1.3 million lawyers and public employees is just more of the same middle age's stratified society crap

I say we roll out america.gov decision models trained in public, deployed in public, built around a legal philosophy of immutable rights to shelter and healthcare and the related technology development and have it bubble initiatives for public vote that don't violate the core legal rights

And if some dealership owner doesn't like it remind them they're one meat of billions and we don't really need them

This whole Mr Rogers touchy feely kid gloves for the professional managerial class, all told fewer people than died during covid, not a truly important cabal then, is no different than anointing kings and barons and regional lords financially... their economic condition is sacrosanct and everyone elses is optional

Changed the semantics, kept the ridiculous ground truth

> I say we roll out america.gov decision models trained in public, deployed in public, built around a legal philosophy of immutable rights to shelter and healthcare and the related technology development and have it bubble initiatives for public vote that don't violate the core legal rights

We have the water boards in the Netherlands that are independent governing bodies with their own taxes and elections. They didn't get absorbed by government because people don't trust generic elected officials. I find it absolutely fascinating because it's so incredibly boring. Their job is to manage everything involved in living below sea level.

It shows that government doesn't have to be one giant hierarchical organization arguing over one giant budget. You can use the formula to house this legal philosophy and make it reasonably immutable. Place it outside the control of the generic political battle ground.

Just having a bunch of obvious static values would already stop the most crazy modifications like making corporations into people and money into speech, how male and female should be defined. As if they ran out of real work.

It would be interesting to see an entire philosophy bolted into place.

> This whole Mr Rogers touchy feely kid gloves for the professional managerial class

I'm most offended by blurring the entire spectrum from incompetent and corrupt to brilliant and hard working.

Desicions are not made by government employees, they simply obey and execute, not without personal gains, of course.

You want to monitor and log someone else. Start with top oligarchs, IMF, World Bank, WEF, Blackrock, Vanguard and so on, then track further behind the curtains.

It would be lovely to trim or get rid of the ruling class but that is far more ambitious than to somewhat guard our political machine from their influence. They will of course still have influence, it just wont be their flavour of direct democracy where they always get what they want.

We should at least try to be a somewhat worthy adversary if only to keep things interesting.

> There is no form of surveillance that does more good than harm in the long run.

...how far do you take this maxim? Should we have any police on the street to enforce speed limits, since they're surveilling the speed of drivers?

I thought the "automated" part was a clear implication of the statement personally.

What "automated" part, I see no "automated" in the OP, but perhaps it was meant. So far we have:

1. "opposed to the fundamental notion that human beings are capable of cooperation and altruism at scale" - a complicated statement, I think it means that keeping people under control stops them from being naturally good.

2. The scale, or as another comment said, "It's harmful when it scales to hundreds of data points across different areas", but why?

3. That comment continues "is automated, and has almost no oversight or accountability baked into the system." It's not clear why anything would be better when inefficient, but here we have an appeal to common sense and some sort of appeals process.

This is rather messy. I get the impression of an argument for case-by-case human decisions.

It reminds me of the data gathering done by businesses, which doesn't even technically harm me or lead to decisions about me personally, but still pisses me off. I'm happy for a store manager to contemplatively watch me shopping while incubating business decisions, but I don't want to be distilled into statistics, it's just offensive - I suppose because it's impersonal. "How do these humans behave mechanically?" is the question implied by the data-gathering.

GP probably meant mass surveillance. I don't think anyone's arguing that a cop with a radar gun watching one piece of road is harmful. It's harmful when it scales to hundreds of data points across different areas, is automated, and has almost no oversight or accountability baked into the system.

Then GP should have said mass surveillance. In this era of all-or-nothing swing-for-the-bleachers with-me-or-against-me hot takes, it matters.

Often, there are many solutions to a problem, with different externalities and implementation requirements. Speed limit enforcement for sure has some benefits, but also some downsides. Any absolute has edge cases that don't work, but I don't in fact think creating the large networks of people empowered to surveil citizens to enforce speed limits is the only viable means of reducing traffic deaths, a goal which is often better served by creating more viable transportation alternatives to cars. I don't think carceral approaches to problems are always wrong, but they are often an attempt to individuate a problem that's better addressed on the level of infrastructure

We don't imprison people for speeding per se in the UK.

Yup, trees, narrower streets, round abouts, speed bumps, (no one would agree to it) one way road spikes... All sorts of proven tricks.

> I am optimistic about the future of AI at Amazon

It's scary to think that any answer but "Strongly Agree" will very likely flag you as a risk.

Is this really the society we want?

Its the society ~1k companies want, and if you don't play along you wont have a job or healthcare.

Capitalism as a practice or an idea needs to be destroyed.

Fictional take:

https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm

Great short story, reminds me of Asimov. RIP Marshall Brain

https://www.reddit.com/r/NCSU/comments/1h0olsv/popular_nc_st...

https://www.reddit.com/user/MarshallBrain

This has nothing to do with capitalism, as these practices antagonise paying customers and quality employees and will lose money to the company in the long run.

This has all to do with people wanting control over other people, which may me classified under authoritarism, totalitarism and the such.

> as these practices antagonise paying customers and quality employees and will lose money to the company in the long run

I've been hearing this for too many years, and so far it hasn't been true.

Maybe next year some of Amazon's customers will somehow become willing to pay more and get less convenience at other retailers, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Oh you can't answer strongly agree to everything, that flags that you're obviously not actually answering, which makes you a risk.

Closed my Amazon (UK) account the other day. Never been happier not to give them money.

I closed mine a while ago specifically because of the anti-union behavior. It's not acceptable and Amazon should meet its end as a corporate entity as a consequence.

You sounds like those chinese when I visited china.

They said, no to american food, stomping on KFC. Recording using iPhone.

Same thing here, I closed my Amazon account, sharing it on HN run on AWS

Deleting my HN account credentials now. Bye o/

Oh, wait.. you can’t actually do that.

"You criticize society, yet you participate in it."

You sounds like those chinese when I visited china.

They said, no to american food, stomping on KFC. Recording with iPhones.

Same thing here, Closing an Amazon account, sharing it on HN running on AWS.

Yet you also participate in society, curious

focus on my comment, not whataboutism.

It’s a well known meme, look it up. You can be against something yet also be forced to participate in some aspect of that very same thing.

One example would be me complaining about capitalism and its natural end state while you can, rightly, say “yet you keep buying things”.

stagnant water rots. that's what happened there.

I don't need to know stupid thousands of memes to participate.

While the phrasing I used derived from a well-known image in modern culture, good enough fundamental literacy skills could likely help you deduce the intent of my reply

HN doesn't run on AWS.

To be fair, Y Combinator is partly responsible for some companies that are almost as bad as Amazon is toward their workers, so yipinwong's point kind of hits anyway.

Healthy work environment https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/makima-is-listening-kishise-n...

I will never understand how corporations are allowed to interfere in any way with unions

it should be a protected freedom to associate and expression

why is it allowed to be gameified where if corporations can detect it early they can stop it?

hands-off people's lives, unions aren't illegal so no interference

They're not. See page 115 of the materials linked from the article. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nosR5ER-VFYiw52si_M5kM9ZBfD...

Is there a legal case there? Union-busting being unconstitutional?

Well, those things are illegal in most countries, according to my understanding?

The thing is, proof to catch the offender, which will be hard in mega corps?

Because of who runs the department of labor. When it comes to labor laws, there are a lot of them that benefit employees but are barely or not at all enforced. Even not paying wages is something the federal DoL rarely has both the will and resources to punish.

We all died during 9/11 and this is hell

right, this something that cant be offshored, and only legalised slavery could optimise there labour costs more, and the robots are not performing quite as well as needed, so a holding action untill they can get a legal frame work to start fining employees for fraternisation with intent. not to worry, it's in the works.

Is there enough training data for the monitoring results to be close to accurate?

Did workforce analytics at a big logistics outfit and this stuff is usually sold internally as "attrition risk" or "engagement heatmaps", never as union anything. Same features though, shift churn, grievance counts, break room badge patterns.

Businesses usually have innocent sounding euphemisms when breaking the law.

Of course. Never put in writing how you're breaking the law.

Glad this is only happening in the UK. In the land of the free I'm sure Amazon would never do something like this /s

Government surveillance is much worse than corporate surveillance but European countries are only interested in restricting the latter, and only when it doesn't get involved with preventing the former.

AmazonUK now requires ID and a selfie for "bladed items": https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/amazon-uk-now-requires-p...

The UK is ranked as one of the least free countries for digital freedom: https://eylenburg.github.io/countries.htm. Worse than India, Brazil, and Vietnam.

>Government surveillance is much worse than corporate surveillance

I think in practice you'll find they go hand in hand together.

My brother in china once told me "In china, every company of a certain size has board seats filled by a representative of the party, to make sure corporate and government priorities align. In america, every company of a certain size sends lobbyists and sometimes runs candidates directly, to make sure corporate and government priorities align"

Concentration of power has many instances of convergent evolution, but societies trending dystopian is heavily correlated with concentration of power regardless of the shape it takes

That's what I said.

You know, when I want to know country rankings of digital freedoms, the very first place i go to is eylenburg.github.io

What are their sources for their statistics? "Source: eylenburg.github.io"

Ah.

You can click each box in the matrix and see the source for the acts in question from each country. What kind of quantitative measure are you expecting?

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