Too late, already done by Cruse: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/11/once-again-ai-is-revealed-to-be-an-army-of-mechanical-turks-in-a-call-center/
It’s ridiculous that this would be an economical business plan.
Usual business mindset on something like this is, “Sure, this is not economical for us, but it’s only for six to nine months while the software guys code up the real software. In the mean time, we’ll collect and maintain market share, and we’ll just swap in the real software when it’s ready.”
Better than thinking you can just swap in a real engine
Offshoring continues to reap dividends. Only thing that’s going to stop that is AI, and that means no one, here nor there, will have jobs
The business plan is to get marketing and to grow the value of the stock even if they actually losing money with that.
I’m all for casheirs and taxi drivers working from home if this translates to that.
You know, as someone who’s been a cashier and a taxi driver, I can see both of those being vaguely plausible.
Probably moreso if businesses actually embraced remote work.
Cashiers, sure. Drivers? No thank you. If we get into a situation, I want to make sure they feel the urgency with me.
It’s going to translate into a trained AI that takes all of those jobs.
Will knowledge workers e-riot hard enough for UBI?
Tell me Y Combi will email their buddies again… they better!
You mean the thing they were advertising in the first place? That’s some false advertising inception. Somehow, that only makes it worse.
Everyone knows that in the near future all taxi driving will be relegated to Robert Picardo.
Tfw I accidentally alt-tab from GTA to Drive From Home application and launch passenger’s taxi off the ramp for stunt bonus.
I swear I remember hearing about a science fiction story where the “self-driving” cars actually just had people hidden in them.
scifi dystopia future where a race of gnomes are created to sit inside things and play mechanical turk
I watched this sketch comedy show in Iceland as a kid, where every week they had a section called “the men behind the curtains”. It was just people hidden away inside ATMs, vending machines etc. pretending it was a machine doing the work.
Slow march to 40k servitors not looking far fetched. Why develop an AI/algorithm when you have no moral conscience and can just make a human do it.
Spoiler
Snowpiercer?
No, there are no cars in that, although I get the connection.
This was a short story or novel I think, but I haven’t read it just heard about it.
Makes sense, I was just joking :)
Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil
If it were Amazon, you know that at least 150 out of those 1000 workers had already been threatened with PIP before being put on a plan. Look up Focus and Pivot, Amazon’s policy that puts around ~5-15% of corporate workers below director level a year on forced attrition.
Nah, this was definitely outsourced to a company in India; you can abuse contract/vendor employees with way less effort than it takes to abuse full-time employees.
Perhaps, although many labelling teams at Amazon for other orgs are in-house or are part-time hours. Amazon likes keeping things in-house because they don’t particularly give a fuck about abusing staff.
No, I can assure you even if they work directly in the building there is no way there isn’t a middle man contract holder that allows the immediate firing of employees without effort. I work in this kind of tech. The goal is to have the least amount of actual employees as possible for these companies because it gives the least liability and the fastest route to letting them go.
Amazon does this with their delivery drivers what makes you think they aren’t making sure there is a middle contract holder here too.
Previously worked for Amazon data labeling. The priority was largely having everything done in-house due to privacy concerns. It’s a lot easier to act on privacy leaks coming from within. That said, the long term strategy is using crowdsourced labeling for anything not having to do with customers or customer data. So looks like you’re both right :)
Ew
Mostly because I work for Amazon, and can both see the org structure and know how it works in other orgs here.
Focus and Pivot
This is also known as “stack ranking” and “rank and yank”.
It’s a super-gross way to run a business. I can see how you might want to “cut the fat” when starting out or growing. But keeping a policy like that for the long haul means selecting for employees that are good at that surviving. And that may not require one to even be all that productive, just good at working the system.
Anecdotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195136
It’s also a recipe for a toxic work environment:
yeah this is exactly how it works for “self-driving” cars: https://gmauthority.com/blog/2023/11/cruise-av-operations-require-1-5-remote-employees-per-vehicle-report-claims/
For cruise, yes
Waymo and Cruise definitely have humans waiting to take over if the autonomous mode gets stuck… so that’s already true!
Its not about automation; its about making labor fungible, kinda like the garmet industry-local workers rights happen, call center instantly relocates.
This is the globalization you get while jacking off with the monkey paw.
I remember trying MTurk out back in the day to try and make money on the side. It’s such a mind numbing activity. Doesn’t surprise me that this is still the model for smart “automated” systems like this.
How long is it gonna take for them to use data created by those indians to train their AI model and replace them?
They’ve surely started working on it already. Current “AI” (LLMs) aren’t perfect. They require constant human adjustments.
I’m an auditor for a “machine learning” algorithm’s work, and it develops new incorrect processes faster than it corrects them. This is because corrections require intervention, which involves a whole chain of humans, whereas learning new mistakes can happen seemingly spontaneously. The premise of machine learning is that it changes over time, but it has no idea which changes were good until it gets feedback.
So, to answer your question, I’m sure they’re throwing a ton of money at that. But when will it be viable, if ever?
Long enough for people to organize or nah?
The self-driving cars secretly being driven by somebody is literally the plot to Captain Laserhawk
It’s also already happening. Waymo admitted to needing wayyyy more manual interventions than they let on
But were they watching in real time?
I used one of these stores like 5-6 years ago, maybe more. It was basically a pop up shop so it was pretty new. It took like 15-20 minutes for me to be charged. I’m positive now that it was some poor Indian watching me because it took so long.
You can’t just steer people into bridge abutments
So thaaaaaat’s what happened with the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
I mean ask Apple or Google how many people listen to their voice systems to manually improve them for accuracy…you have to train the AI somehow
Yeah except with there being only 27 stores in the US that use this tech if you have 1000 people reviewing the purchases is it really a machine learning system or are you just outsourcing the process to people in another country.
You still have to keep training the Model. These stores were in large busy markets, and having people watch and critique the AI is how they continually train the model. It took Apple over 8 years to ‘announce’ they’re doing on device voice recognition(they probably aren’t), and that was just voice recognition and LLM training vs image recognition which is hard on its own. Let alone tracking a person THROUGH a store, recognizing that someone picked something up and took it vs put it back or left it on another row.
The real reason this probably happened is because those 1000 people training the model reported metrics of failures on top of the stores showing losses due to error. The margin of error was probably greater than they wanted. Or add in the biometric data they had integrated into it adding more layers of cost and privacy protection…it probably just doesn’t return the money they wanted and they’ll try again in a few years probably utilizing more RFID on top of the image recognition and people tracking.
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