That’s how those bosses get rich: by hiding the pitfalls of technology for underpaid, unrecognized human hard work.
In 2021, when Amazon introduced its first “simply available” grocery store in the U. K. in Ealing, west London, this newspaper reported on the cutting-edge technologies that Amazon says have made it possible: facial popularity cameras, sensors on the shelves. and of course “artificial intelligence”. Early consumers lined up outside, eager to see the future. “I’m an early adopter,” one of them said. “I can’t wait to see how this new generation performs and I think it will soon be everywhere. “.
The promise of “just walk out” outlets meant that consumers wouldn’t want to wait in line at the cashier, scan their own items, or even take a break on the way out. They can simply grab whatever they want, walk through the door, and the benevolent, all-knowing eye of the generation would seamlessly appraise their products, debit their account, and send them a receipt.
The fact that other people were watching Amazon consumers shop. More than 1,000 of them, The Information reported, look at cameras and tag buyers’ photographs. A worker who has worked on the generation said that genuine humans, even if they are remote and invisible, founded in India, reviewed about 70% of sales made at “cashierless” outlets in mid-2022 (Amazon responded that “the characterization of the role and number of human reviewers is not accurate”). Reportedly, it’s moving away from the “just get out” and instead implementing “smart shopping carts” (aka a scanner in your cart, big shout).
I can’t stress enough that this shouldn’t come as a surprise. First of all, the fake robot is very, very old. This dates back to at least 1770 and the original “Mechanical Turk,” a chess-playing robot that captivated Europeans. courts for decades until it was revealed that it was a series of grandmasters hidden in a box. Recent updates include Facebook’s “smart assistant,” M, which claimed to be an AI but returned all complex queries to people; and Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company whose operations required remote workers to travel between two-and-a-half and five miles.
All of those stories are, separately, quite funny. But taken together, they paint a picture of a society and culture that are completely incapable of recording the violence inflicted on them, simply because the old procedure is wrapped in the tapes of “technology. “This violence manifests itself simultaneously in the streets and on the global stage. What makes me angry about how we fall into the trap is not just that we deserve to know better, but what the prices really are to do it.
The national minimum wage in the UK is £11. 44. A small grocery store like Amazon Fresh retail stores may have a dozen painters. Assuming everyone earned the full salary (unlikely) and everyone earned the lowest salary (i. e. not executives), the average individual salary would be around £20,000 and the annual salary bill would be around £130,000. When this painting is outsourced through video cameras, it is passed on to knowledge taggers. Amazon’s remote knowledge taggers can be paid just one or two pounds an hour, if they’re lucky. If you upgrade a dozen UK painters with a dozen specialist labellers in India, Kenya or the Philippines, the difference in the annual staff bill alone can be almost £100,000 a year.
Jeff Bezos is the second richest user in the world, with a fortune of around $205 billion (£163 billion). These coins don’t come out of nowhere. It doesn’t come out of a slot device at the end of the dock called, “I learned to code at Princeton and that’s why I’m better than you. “This is the result of intentionally hiding the actual paintings: designing, making, sorting, packing, cooking, growing, delivering – little icons on your smartphone screen to reduce the price. This is the systematic use of the fake robot trick to lower the price of labor, until other people sleep in tents in the factory. doors and then coins in the difference.
The length of Bezos’s rocket is decided very precisely through the price difference between paying an employee in Britain and an employee in India, adding up all the traditionally decided racist and colonialist inequalities that the calculation implies. Mistake: Bezos and his ilk will pay even less for a robot, as soon as possible. The only lesson from Amazon Fresh is that we’re not there yet.
The fake robot also has a purpose: it’s a distraction. In 2021, Amazon and Google jointly signed a $1. 2 billion contract to supply the State of Israel, adding the military, with cloud computing and artificial intelligence systems. While there’s no evidence that generation Google or Amazon has been used to kill civilians, this ongoing deal shows a willingness to engage with an army that has killed another 30,000 people and whose use of “AI-powered” targets allows it to say, “The device did it. “
“Just get out” would possibly have passed its day, yet the elision of customer convenience and credible denial is alive and well on the high street. Tesco opened its first GetGo store in 2021, promising the same kind of payment-free convenience that “just get out” – they now have outlets in London, Birmingham and Welwyn Garden City. Tesco boasts that instead of employing facial recognition, GetGo creates “skeletal outlines” of you. The generation of this service is provided through Trigo, an Israeli company that boasts that almost all of its engineers have been “selected from elite army units,” adding Unit 8200, the IDF’s army surveillance agency, and Unit 9900, its specialized surveillance and surveillance service. Point-to-point tracking of unknown bodies through the built space, based on algorithmic gait and posture research?I wonder where they learned to do this.