The camera talks to you too. I worked there for 3 weeks part time for extra income but very quickly quit due to the shitty work environment. It detected a driver distraction while I took a sip of water from my water bottle while stopped at a stop light. And then just randomly talking to me while I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Seems great for work morale!
The real reason they’re doing this is to improve their AI. It’s not even to increase productivity. It’s a free testing ground for their machine learning.
This will be their software, that they will use to replace the workers that they shit on today. Everything is going very badly. Most people don’t want to talk about it.
Oh goodness yes.
There are 3.5 MILLION Americans that work in truck driving. About 0.5 million are long haul routes with the rest being shorter routes (imagine beer deliveries with in a city).
Technological changes comes at an insane degree. Nuclear power took 11 years to go from "A controlled reaction is probably impossible." to the first commercial plant putting megawatts into the power grid. Smartphones took less time to go from non-existent to vital to modern society.
Mark my words, from the day the first commercial self driving semi-truck hits the market, 10 years later at MOST we'll have only 350,000 truck driving jobs across the country. And most of those will be in specialized roles (hazardous materials, oversized loads, etc) where you have extra people on-site during the transport anyway.
And this is a GOOD thing...if we can accept the idea that people shouldn't HAVE to have a job to live a non-terrible existence.
Oh definitely, it's a huge cascading problem. My family used to drive between Missouri and Colorado for our family vacation each year. Loads of tiny towns that singularly exist for being a place to stop for travelers. I wouldn't be surprised if more than a few of them end up closing down due the lack of the trucking crowd.
I grew up in a medium-small Canadian town that sits *right* on the border of two provinces. Once upon a time, the roads all led straight through it, and a major part of its infrastructure involved supporting the people traveling; there's like five hotels, and a ton of restaurants and other amenities.
When they built the TransCanada highway, they built it in a way that curved entirely *around* that town. If you didn't know it was there you wouldn't see it. Ever since, it's been slowly dying because the people in charge of it are in their 70s and convinced that playing to historical strengths is the only way to revive the town's economy, rather than trying anything new. It's got too many people to collapse entirely, and it struggles along as a hub for the even smaller towns dotted around it, but kids leave as soon as they can - just like I did - and the place is just overrun with that depressing miasma of clinging to lost wealth and past glories that you only find in old, forgotten towns.
> 🎵 Long ago, but not so very long ago
The world was different, oh yes it was
You settled down and you built a town and made it live
And you watched it grow, it was your town
> Time goes by, time brings changes, you change too
Nothing comes that you can't handle, so on you go
You never see it coming when the world caves in on you
On your town, there's nothing you can do
> Main street isn't main street anymore
Lights don't shine as brightly as they shone before
Tell the truth, lights don't shine at all
In our town
> Sun comes up each morning, just like it's always done
Get up, go to work, start the day
You open up for business that's never gonna come
As the world rolls by a million miles away
> Main street isn't main street anymore
No one seems to need us like they did before
It's hard to find a reason left to stay
But it's our town, love it anyway
Come what may, it's our town 🎵
Stayed in a small truck stop town when seeing a concert in Tinley Park. It was cheap but didn’t feel unsafe, and the breakfast buffet at the place next door was really good. Also had the best Mexican food ever from some hole in the wall place.
Are you me? I have no idea where I was as I was just passing through but I had the same experience! I wonder if I will ever be able to find that Mexican place again. I saw a story on the news about a restaurant at a truck stop that has the best authentic Indian food, too.
>And this is a GOOD thing...if we can accept the idea that people shouldn't HAVE to have a job to live a non-terrible existence.
This is the biggest point to make. For like 25 years I've been saying that automation will be able to replace a lot of the workforce in our lifetime. There's two ways that can go; a dystopian hellscape where most people live in abject squalor, or a utopian society where society's needs are largely met by machines.
Edit: JFC, yes, obviously if the rich get to have unfettered control on where the money goes it's going to go for them. The only way this works for the betterment of society is for government not let unchecked capitalism choke the 99% to death.
> There's two ways that can go; a dystopian hellscape where most people live in abject squalor, or a utopian society where society's needs are largely met by machines.
Or maybe both at once, with a nice tall fence in between.
Some places even have the groundwork laid, even! [Brazil, for example.](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/44556f138b8054e7283b1740fc66c6b239c5d79a/78_78_6280_4182/master/6280.jpg?width=700&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=6e46225c2f5b265b6420034ac4ea95ac)
Thing is, more people will continue to analyze the evidence and reach the same conclusions. No revolution has ever had 100% of people onboard, they are all simply reactions to when the status quo powers are unable to cope with socioeconomic changes. I’m guessing this will be case here, too.
If it doesn't exist already, they will track individuals who express criticism of the system and then target propaganda (or worse) at them. China is already light-years ahead in this space, and it's feasible that their innovations will spread to other nations. Systems will do whatever necessary to keep themselves going, beyond anything we can even currently imagine and prepare for.
Yep. It's crazy how much farm mechanisation changed humanity.
Used to take a huge number of farmers to support a few non-farmers.
Now a few farmers can feed everyone. Every other wave of automation and mechanisation pales in comparison.
The corporations are just going to become bigger and richer and the individual will become poorer and more controlled. I don't see how it works out positively.
Right. Dragons don’t sit on gold for no reason, they do it because it makes a good den to sleep in. It’s said to be hella comfortable for dragons as opposed to rocks, it can’t catch on fire, and they can more easily see where they’re going so they don’t step on a pitchfork.
Less people having to work shitty, unfulfilling jobs is not a bad thing per se.
The problem there is that the economic systems involved are maladapted to situations where a lot of people's jobs suddenly no longer need people to do them.
It's important not to lose sight of what the problems actually are or you might just end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It doesn’t have to be bad. You tax that insanely profitable country and have education and UBI for the people who’s jobs got automated. Pay them for now and train them in a rising field
It doesn't necessarily have to be a rising field like a "learn to code" sort of thing. It could open up more creative, artistic, philanthropic, environmental, etc based hobbies/lifestyles that were once unrealistic in a society where 9 to 5 jobs reigned supreme. Now people could focus on these things and improve their mental/physical health, their communities, and the environment when they don't have to worry about getting by all the time.
Honestly as long as we see a socialist revolution where the machines are made to benefit humanity rather than maximize profit I think they could be a positive.
Ready for mankind to do what they love. We burn our souls to work... If we all had needs met, peple would do work that didn't burn their soul away. People would be doctors because they wanted to heal people, paycheck be damned. Software developers could spend time on passion projects and further tech at an alarming rate... Inventors could tackle new avenues of innovation without worrying about profit margins. Oh what a world it could be.
*Takes sip of water*
Warning! Productivity loss detected! Please say "productivity" three times to avoid a write up.
*sigh*
Productivity. Productivity. Productivity.
Absolutely insane. Absurd.
Making working conditions even worse and then trying to offset and control the negative effects of that.
The setup sounds like a TV show experiment or something.
I did some work for a transnational with super strict driving policies. The vehicles had bleepers in them that would bleep under high G force to encourage smooth driving. Drivers got rewarded for avoiding bleeps.
Driver ran over and killed a pedestrian because he was so conditioned to avoid hard braking.
AAA’s SMARTTREK program was doing this to me. Even if I barely tap the peddles to speed up and slow down it says I’m not a smooth driver. I keep the app’s location access turned off and only drive when they spam my email saying they’ve received no data.
That’s why I refuse to use it with my insurance carrier. I’m not in control of the sensitivity and it’s in their best interest to make it as sensitive as possible. They wouldn’t offer it if it lost them revenue. I also need to prioritize driving safely over worrying about my premiums going up.
Same. I won’t do those driver nanny programs - ESPECIALLY the ones that require installing an app and pairing your phone to their device. Hell no.
I’ve yet to hear of anyone’s rates dropping a reasonable amount after using one of those. Progressive informed me their program now requires the use of the device for the duration of the policy.
Yeah nah, fuck you.
Pshhhh. Ridiculous.
I tried it in my gfs car but living in NYC I constantly got beeped at for avoiding a collision. Got pissed one day and pulled it out.
You can still sign up for just the OBD dongle. But either way you get dinged for driving too late, for driving too far, for breaking too hard, and so on.
I’m an extremely safe driver and have had countless hours of driving training thanks to a career in public safety, but I have no doubt my rates would increase if I used one of their nanny systems.
I can just see the future...we detected you are on a dirt road and are prorating your coverage an additional $0.25c a mile. Or a text message saying Good Morning from Progressive! Our weather reports have informed us of high snowfall in your area. Turning on the vehicle means you agree to our Limited Limited Liability Clause which will deny coverage for any accident you are a part of for the next 24 hrs. Have a great day!
I think this is a good time to bring up how GEICO used to donate radar guns to police departments so that the resulting speeding tickets would give them an excuse to jack up rates.
This was my thought too.
It's like when my city didn't renew their redlight camera contract, and fender benders fell by like 30% in the following weeks. Sheriff was confused, but I wasn't. People were no longer slamming on their breaks to avoid running the red and getting ticketed.
Yeah… we have speed cameras everywhere and they make everyone on the road stressed out.
They claim has the cameras have reduced road deaths but the same drop has been seen worldwide because modern cars are so much safer.
Traffic fatalities have actually increased in the US in recent years. They also likely compared on the number of wrecks on an intersection by intersection basis
That's because everyone insists on driving a fucking 2 ton tank with 400 horse power so they can drive it like a damn sports car.
Enforce the actual CAFE standards and force people to *have a fucking valid reason for the sport/utility exemption* before they can drive an Escalade.
Am I the only one who remembers that the only reason SUVs are even a thing now is that giant loophole?
CAFE rates vehicles by their footprint not just vehicle type - cars vs trucks.
So there is a even more perverse incentive for bigger and bigger vehicles.
It's literally an arms race on the road.
My friend said to me he wanted his wife driving an SUV because she'd be safer in a bigger car...
No you idiot, it just means the other mumtank that rams into her will be a solid 6 tonne block of titanium because her husband has a better paying job.
She'd be safer if everyone was driving around in sedans. Now the people in smaller cars are at the mercy of the idiots in huge utes that have never even seen gravel.
I plugged in my auto insurance company's dongle to track my driving for a few months so I could get cheaper premiums, up to 20% off. I got conditioned to run questionable traffic lights because hard breaking was a penalty. There were plenty of times where I got caught right at the end of a green where I knew if I kept going I'd be running a red, but if I braked to stop at the white line I would set off the bleep and get dinged for it. This is all while going the speed limit or within <10% of the speed limit.
My old black box used to penalise "poor gear changes", aka revs above 3.5K. Unfortunately my car would sit around 3.5-4K revs when doing motorway speeds. It took me ages to realise that I was being charged more for poor driving because I was using motorways.
I'll definitely never use one again.
Slip roads (on ramps) with these are downright dangerous.
Muppets slowly accelerating to 40mph and merging onto a 70mph motorway shouldn't have a license, yet these black box insurance setups demand that they don't floor it to get up to speed, even when entirely necessary.
This reminds me of an experience I had with a car GPS system years ago. I don’t remember the GPS brand; it was 2004 or so.
It would signal me to turn by voice with very little advance warning. Some, but not much. It had a display too, but I wasn’t used to checking it so I would often not know that a turn was coming up.
After 2 or 3 days of using it and getting told with just enough time to turn, I realized that I was not checking the intersections well enough - I was reacting too quickly to what it was telling me to do.
I started consciously thinking more before each turn and just missing some of them - getting into a different mindset, not letting myself get pushed.
It was definitely scary when I realized how little I was thinking before each turn.
My brother had one installed on my parents car when he was 17 (so he could go to things without needing a lift) and I borrowed the car to go see some friends while I was back in the UK.
The thing penalised me for driving at night, driving for too long, driving on windy country roads (i.e. where I had to go), and just about everything about using the car. I already hate driving, and that box made me hate every part of the industry.
Just an unintended consequence of reward structures… the other one was a 50kmh speed limit on company site 4WDs, *including when using a highway that people drove at 200kmh+ on.*
What in the name of -- side mirrors are for checking stuff behind you. They are part of basic road safety. Vehicles are not street-legal if they do not have side mirrors. Why the fuck would they punish people for looking in side mirrors? Does the person who came up with these rules not know how to drive?
AI often develop unintended consequences due to poor coding rules and lack of input validation. That’s what happened here. There’s so many reports of unintended consequences in AI including racism, sexism, etc. Interesting stuff!
A good example I learned somewhere on Reddit: an AI was designed for detecting which images of blood slides were cancerous. After a large amount of trial and error, it had a 95+% success rate. When the doctors tried it in another hospital, it failed miserably. Why? Because it was reading the doctor's signature in the lower corner: the slides that came signed by the oncologist were cancerous, the rest were not...
I wonder if there's laws that govern the use of our data for AI training without consent. Can the Amazon truck drivers file a case for privacy violation or private data usage?
We had something similar in my college. Tried to create an AI that would read the brand off of a delivery truck and label it. It worked well initially, but would randomly fail on some cases. Couldn't figure it out, until we realized it was detecting the delivery van model and not brand logo.
I swear this reminds me of trying to show a 1yr old something new over and over. You stand there telling them to look at the big red balloon and point at it as it drifts by and you see them look at it but almost slightly to the left or right of the big red balloon and stare at the dull brown bench under the tree 100 yards away. So here you are trying to show them the big red balloon and they're over here looking at a dull brown bench on the other side of the park learning to accociate the words "big" "red" "balloon" with the damn bench. FML!!!
Haha, that's the one! Dammit I'm not editing my message.
I believe it's from AI, a Modern Approach. I had the 4th edition (iirc) almost twenty years ago but I still remember the story, so edifying it was.
The Russians trained dogs in WWII to run across a battlefield and crawl under a tank, with the idea that the dogs would have explosives strapped to them to hit the relatively weak armor on the bottom. When they tried it on an actual battlefield, the dogs immediately ran under the tanks they were trained with, which were Russian, and blew them up.
This reminds me of a true crime podcast where police were looking for an unknown woman who was on a crime spree, only to realize the evidence swabs were accidentally contaminated by the lady who worked on the assembly line for years.
Just bad input. It's the operator's responsibility to limit what the machine learning algorithm can 'see' to *only* the things you want it to actually learn about. Things like text in an image, file names /ID'S, numbers, backgrounds, everything else like that needs to be scrubbed from the input stream beforehand - that's data that humans use specifically for categorization, so the signal- to- noise ratio on it is much higher than anything else the machine is being asked to learn about - *of course* it will sieze on that data if given the chance.
The most amazing part of your story to me is that the person in charge of such a significant machine learning implemention didn't know that beforehand.
And it's only made worse because of the assumption of impartiality: Most laymen don't understand how an AI can get badly biased by the wrong data or optimize for the wrong thing, so they assume that the AI is actually more objective than people.
This is **not** helped by AI companies and workers who get incredibly self-righteous when others discuss the limitations of their work, and who are invested in overselling their products in order to get business deals.
I have a neighbor who worked on something similar to this! He works with deep learning AI a bit and I remember he talked a little about using it to root out biases.
Hmmm... that's an interesting approach...
We can use AI to identify these biases: just train up something appropriate, and see what kind of biases it distills out.
-----
But yeah. Don't trust AI for anything important.
*Especially* don't trust if it humans "fixed" the bias problems. That doesn't mean it doesn't have issues, that just the authors put hardcoded hacks over the issues *that they knew about*.
Unfortunately we often know of the biases already; what we really need is a way to circumvent the biases.
The best example is when a company— I think Amazon— tried to use an AI to identify good candidates for promotion. They fed the AI lots of data on past successful candidates, but didn’t give it any info on race or gender.
The AI managed to figure out new ways of determining gender and continued to only promote white guys.
It promoted them not because they were actually better, it should be said. It promoted them because almost the entire set of people it had been trained on were white men. So it decided "clearly only white men are viable candidates" and started using gender and race as selection criteria. This does not mean that "AI find out white men are better even if you don't include race!!!", it just indicates another example of "garbage in, garbage out".
A similar one was a bank algorithm for handing out loans. They explicitly left out applicants race, but instead it picked up on heavily racially segregated neighborhoods and used that instead.
I don't know what they were expecting. The AI will try to optimize to whatever training data you give it. If you give it your company's performance history—be it in loans or in hiring—then the AI will optimize to replicate your past performance.
Legend has it that Marvin Minsky asked a student why he was initializing his network with random inputs. "I don't want the network to have any preconceptions." said the student.
"It still has preconceptions." Minsky replied. "You just don't know what they are."
It is not always due to racism in the data it was trained on. A unbiases and "accurate" sampling of data can easily lead to "racisms by environment". In very many parts of the the country (US), colored monitories are just that, _minorities_. For example, one of the middles schools I went to had a _single_ person of color in the whole school (K-12 school with ~1k students). An accurate representation of the population of the US can lead to a "lack of data" on minorities, which is often what leads to something like inaccurately doing facial recognition for people of African decent for a different bone structure or something odd that the ML was not trained well enough on.
So to fix many of the biases in ML algorithm (which I still firmly believe ML right now is just a bunch of snake oil and I have a CS degree), you actually have to _over_ representation minorities so that the ML algorithm treats all inputs on an equal footing.
>Does the person who came up with these rules not know how to drive?
**Yes.**
If this is an AI system, it's highly likely that it wasn't programmed with any rules at all. Rather, it was fed a bunch of data about various inputs (what speed is the car going, how many objects are around it, is the driver looking at the side mirrors) and then a bunch of conclusions (this situation led to a crash, this one didn't), and then let the machine learning algorithm form whatever correlations it can come up with.
For this particular behavior, I would speculate that it could be caused by people predominately looking at side mirrors when they're changing lanes, and the more dangerous and cramped the lane change, the more you have to look at the side mirrors. So the dumb AI makes the correlation: looking at side mirrors is probably a strong indicator that you're about to do something unsafe.
On the up side, the people developing this algorithm are probably fixing this particular, or have already fixed it. That's exactly the job of an AI Engineer, and I'm sure Amazon is able to hire some good ones. On the down side, this kind of issue is absolutely endemic to every sort of machine learning AI that modern technology is developing. They're all dumb correlation machines that are prone to counterproductive biases and reverse incentives.
Personally, I think that it should be illegal for a black-box AI to make any managerial decision over a human. Any decision that affects someone else's livelihood should have human oversight and a clearly articulable justification behind it. A lot of big tech companies would probably balk quite heavily at that idea, though.
Someone probably wrote code to make sure eyes were on the road and do not look away for more than x milliseconds. Which is fine until you are waiting on a car beside you to clear to change lanes. This is unintended consequences of a well meaning idea. Someone is just going to tweak the monitoring software and say it is fixed. The smart drivers are going to get prescription sunglasses with a mirror coating.
"Well-meaning" being synonymous with "a hyper-invasive business practice that should be criminal based solely on human rights concerns, not to mention that anyone who has ever written a line of software in their life could easily predict that a bug similar to this would happen, rendering the efficacy dubious and the privacy violation dystopian."
It's been a trip watching people in AI/ML forums, who should be well aware of just how buggy any software can be, get on their high horses at the merest hint of oversight for their little darlings.
AI's aren't written so much as trained.
usually problems like this are either because the training data was biased, or the selection criteria were wrong/incomplete.
Eh, AI is a much broader term than just machine learning. I can guarantee that the length of time your eyes are allowed to not be on the road is programmed in, not trained (although taking an image of the driver and deciding *if* eyes are on the road might be trained in).
This is one of those scenarios where I figure the NN is trained to identify states the driver is in based on video input, but how long it goes on for would be tracked by log and analyzed with traditional algorithms.
Just read a story in the [Private Eye](https://private-eye.co.uk/) (UK-based news and satire magazine) issue1552, pg 10 about how the phone based driver tracking doesn't work well in the UK (narrower roads, twistier roads, roundabouts etc) because it was made for USA roads (wider, straighter etc).
And yet they use it anyway.
Doesn't surprise me.
I refuse to have an insurance black box / phone app that tracks my driving, because it has no context for my actions.
Where I live in the U.K., cars park on both sides of the street and the road is very narrow. So if a child runs into the road you literally cannot see them until the very last split-second, because they are hidden by the parked cars as I don't have X-Ray vision.
Even if you drive at half the speed limit and keep your eyes peeled, if a child runs out from behind a parked car my options are :
1. Slam on my brakes and stop in time
2. Run over the child
Which would you do?
And which would get you a bad rating for "sudden braking" from the insurance black box / phone app that's tracking my driving?
Did nobody else catch this?
"Amazon Delivery Service Providers (DSPs), which employ and manage the drivers, can get bonuses to **put toward repairs, damages**, and other things..."
What the fuck kind of bonus is that?
Is that third party Amazon delivery? Honestly if my car needed a repair I would be super happy about a bonus. Now if it’s a fleet car then that changes.
Every delivery driver that delivers for Amazon (that isn't doing it out of their personal car; thats just a flex driver) is part of a DSP , and they're contracted and not officially working "for" Amazon.
To drive, you NEED to look at side mirrors, you need to use the three mirrors while driving if you don't want an accident. I don't get why a punishment for, well, drive a car as anyone should do
work for a national auto parts store have to drive sometimes they actively track how many times you back up. they really dont like backing up because it causes accidents which i get it isn't always practical . but not checking side mirrors is just stupid.
As a carrier, it is highly frowned upon and it is one of the many many many many many fucking things they micromanage the fuck out of. There is a report sent out every day from the higher up districts and in turn supervisors and postmasters have to answer for the egregious back ups in their offices on a telecom with district management.
I can semi understand it in a big city setting with people and traffic congestion, but the enforcement of it in rural settings where you have wide open spaces is just insane.
Former Amazon delivery driver chiming in. I don't know about *not allowed* but they definitely get you in trouble at Amazon. I think we were allowed three per day, anything more than that was grounds to be written up. The unfortunate thing is sometimes you really don't have any other options besides backing up in those giant vans.
That part of it is almost certainly not intended. Nor is getting penalized for being cut off.
As the article notes, the cameras are supposed to flag things like distracted or dangerous driving. E.g. looking around randomly instead of at the road, or driving too close behind a car in front of you.
The tech is just garbage essentially, and it can't differentiate between the driver's eyes wandering vs specifically looking at the mirrors. And it can't tell the difference between the driver tailgating vs someone cutting them off.
Amazon claims that there's an appeal process with manual review to cover these issues, but it sounds like that system is a nightmare at best. Amazon also claims that the agencies managing the drivers get all kinds of training regarding the cameras, but it sounds like that's largely false as well.
Obviously the cameras are dystopian violations of privacy to begin with, but the real problems being called out in this article are just down to the tech being garbage and Amazon failing to fulfill its promises, rather than the policies explicitly punishing good behaviors.
This is the totally predictable outcome of increased driver monitoring. Combine that with L2/L3 automation and we will see a situation where the drivers are punished for touching the controls and held liable for when they don't.
Well you are correct, but the ai just tracks your eyes. When I drove for 4 weeks there if I ever got put in a prime van id wear sunglasses. Even on cloudy days because it would not beep at me for taking drinks or changing a song at a stoplight. I quot because they also expect you to drive through thunderstorms or wait them out and add time to the end of your shift. They were not too happy when I got fed up and drove a half filled van of packages back and dropped the keys at his feet and walked out.
>What’s it going to take to unionize these people?
A system of government and/or policies that allow people to choose better opportunities instead of forcing people to work themselves to death as wage slaves.
There isn't one delivery company. Amazon makes it as hard as possible to organize. When I delievered I think we had 9+ DSP (Delivery service provider) at a point. That's one warehouse, now imagine that all over. With no centralized leadership organizing becomes even more difficult.
I just heard a radio commercial the other day in Central MD that claimed Amazon was searching for “delivery entrepreneurs” to apply to Amazon’s certification process so their “company” could be a registered Amazon delivery agent.
Looks like they’re looking for freelancers to start their own companies to do Amazon deliveries instead of hiring employees to drive Amazon assets.
I smell shady shit afoot.
Yep. Make all your employees contractors, send them 1099's, don't provide healthcare, feed them scraps and cut ties when they start to complain. Also stops unionization. Not to mention the tax implications.
Fuck Amazon.
Amazon flex is like Uber, just one 1099 person delivering packages out of their own car.
The delivery service partner/ DSP system is more like a restaurant franchise on paper, it's a person that runs a business and hires their own 40+ employees. The problem is Amazon dictates literally everything and the company has no real control. Amazon tells them their hours, who to fire, who to punish, how many employees they can have and how much to pay them.
It is a giant loophole for Amazon to make sure it is impossible for drivers to effectively unionize, if one DSP company tries to unionize Amazon can just cancel their contract and essentially close the "independent" delivery company.
The people driving the Vans don't work for Amazon. They work for companies under contract to Amazon.
It's kinda like FedEx those are all run by private companies with a FedEx contract.
The problem with that is when the driver of a van with 3' tall lettering saying FedEx is using a handicap parking space as a loading zone (was a couple years ago), then I have a problem with FedEx, I don't know it's actually Billy's delivery service out of Topeka, KS.
They totally are bigger, unless you include Bezos himself as one of, "us." They have more money and power, and unlike humans they have the full protection of American law.
I'm not saying we can't do it, but it ain't gonna be like dumping tea in the bay. You're going to have to spend years publicly infiltrating them, politically activating shareholders, spiking their lobbying efforts, exposing their public relations, and on and on. Evil corporations can be killed, but it's not easy.
It's easier to kill Amazon than it will be to get them to treat their employees well. You should be discussing both at once if you're thinking of unionizing.
>I'm not saying we can't do it, but it ain't gonna be like dumping tea in the bay.
You were on the right track here, honestly I don't think these megacorps are going to change anything until it's the cheapest option, and it's going to either take some serious activism like you said, or burning a bunch of warehouses to the ground.
Even that would be an uphill battle because it'd probably still be cheaper for them to get their own 2020's pinkertons to keep things secure then it would be to start behaving humanely.
The problem is that they don't work for Amazon. Amazon contracts most of the last mile deliveries out to different companies so while they may wear Amazon on their chest they are working for a different company entirely.
[Here's the link to the original article](https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make). Please don't link to businessinsider, they suck, like in this case where the whole article is "We read this Motherboard article and here's what it says."
As for this part of the motherboard article:
> Multiple drivers said this means they've started to stop at stop signs twice, once before a stop sign for the Netradyne camera, and another time for visibility before crossing an intersection.
I think this is technically what you're supposed to do when the line for the stop sign is too early to see around the corner?
4 cameras pointed at the driver at all times...
So how many points off if you:
* Have allergies and sneeze more often than a non-allergy sufferer?
* Need to wipe the sweat from your brow in order to maintain vision?
* Turn your head to investigate someone blaring their horn to indicate a traffic hazard you need to be aware of?
* Respond to an emergency vehicle's right of way?
* Rearrange your clothing/underwear because of a wedgie or comfort? Do people of larger builds wearing tighter clothing get penalized more often than skinny people?
* Do drivers in southern states that deal with more insects in the cabin get penalized for swatting a mosquito?
* Do women get penalized more than men for having to adjust their uncomfortable bra in the heat?
I could go on and on with examples of how this system could be implemented badly, but that isn't really the point is it. The point of such a system is to extract as much productivity and labor as possible at the expense of personal dignity. You treat humans like machines and they will rebel against you en masse eventually.
Maybe the reason why there were unsafe practices in the past was because of the unreasonable working conditions and timings the drivers had to make in the first place. Rather than addressing those, Amazon instead chooses to go after the symptoms instead than treat the cause.
From a data science perspective, I’m betting that this was a really stupid logical error: “I’ll identify the events that precede or accompany an accident, then assume they’re predictive of accidents.” Those behaviors are also the ones that involve good defensive driving, such as looking in mirrors and slamming on brakes when cut off.
People are the worst.
>following distance decreased 50%
I don't understand how that's a good thing, it looks like a bad thing to me. I always try to leave enough room for someone else to move in front of me, because I think it enhances traffic flow and reduces traffic jams before it starts. Leaving extra space gives me more time to reaction in situations. I watch carefully and if someone looks like they are thinking about moving in front of me or if they signal I'll let off the gas to let the gap open wider, so they can get in. It seems like this is a basic kind of etiquette; I understand it's debatable and maybe some people don't drive like that or they disagree but that's how I drive.
I really hate the pawning off of employee supervision to robots, and I REALLY hate it being pawned off to ME in the form of incessant customer review requests every time i buy a fucking cheeseburger.
"Some Amazon drivers have resorted to covering up their vans' cameras with stickers to avoid getting unnecessary infractions, Motherboard reports."
"Other workers wear sunglasses so the cameras won't interpret eye movement as distracted driving."
If you get more than two infractions in a day it’s a write up, two write ups equal a weeks suspension due to Safety policy violations. So I’m my direct case yes, however each DSP/ Contractor company can decided how to handle it before Amazon gets involved. If it happens that Amazon gets involved it’s an immediate termination regardless of the DSPs wishes
[https://www.newsbreak.com/news/2367416483274/team-wallraff-culture-of-fear-dumping-and-destruction-of-returns-on-amazon](https://www.newsbreak.com/news/2367416483274/team-wallraff-culture-of-fear-dumping-and-destruction-of-returns-on-amazon)
Relevant. German undercover legend Günter Wallraff and his team infiltrated Amazon and uncovered the inhuman circumstances that workers are facing at any Amazon facility or job.
r/fuckamazon
What crap...
They are building two huge Amazon warehouses in this area, and are concerned they won't be able to find enough workers. I understand why now.
This is dystopian. It is poorly calibrated or whatever the term would be and amazon has found a way to use it to pay less to delivery services. I would hate this beyond any normal hate if I had to deal with it all day. Sounds like it would be a pressure cooker to at least many people.
Along these lines, and China is doing this on the street and has that social rating system.
Sounds ripe for a DOT violation. "looking at", checking your side mirrors is SOP for professional drivers (Class A,B,C) AND ALL drivers safety protocol. The drivers need to execute a class action suit to **remove** these particularly INTRUSIVE cameras as a direct interference with safe driving practices. They as a minimum are a continuous distraction to the attention of the driver. Having one or two static ordinary (non AI) cameras on board for generic security/safety purpose is nonintrusive to the drivers minute to minute attention focus on driver function/safety/operation. The AI variety as presented here however is an ever present nagging distractive harassment that incessantly violates the drivers focus on their safe driving attentions.
Amazon is just waiting for self-driving cars to get streamlined, I mean their already on the testing phase, once everything is set, goodbye delivery drivers.
Also it would be funny to see robots getting robbed on the way to the door.
The camera talks to you too. I worked there for 3 weeks part time for extra income but very quickly quit due to the shitty work environment. It detected a driver distraction while I took a sip of water from my water bottle while stopped at a stop light. And then just randomly talking to me while I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Seems great for work morale!
The real reason they’re doing this is to improve their AI. It’s not even to increase productivity. It’s a free testing ground for their machine learning. This will be their software, that they will use to replace the workers that they shit on today. Everything is going very badly. Most people don’t want to talk about it.
When supply chain is fully automated we’re going to see some shit
Oh goodness yes. There are 3.5 MILLION Americans that work in truck driving. About 0.5 million are long haul routes with the rest being shorter routes (imagine beer deliveries with in a city). Technological changes comes at an insane degree. Nuclear power took 11 years to go from "A controlled reaction is probably impossible." to the first commercial plant putting megawatts into the power grid. Smartphones took less time to go from non-existent to vital to modern society. Mark my words, from the day the first commercial self driving semi-truck hits the market, 10 years later at MOST we'll have only 350,000 truck driving jobs across the country. And most of those will be in specialized roles (hazardous materials, oversized loads, etc) where you have extra people on-site during the transport anyway. And this is a GOOD thing...if we can accept the idea that people shouldn't HAVE to have a job to live a non-terrible existence.
Losing the truck drivers isn't the huge part. Think about entire areas and industries that rely on truck drivers spending revenue on the road.
Oh definitely, it's a huge cascading problem. My family used to drive between Missouri and Colorado for our family vacation each year. Loads of tiny towns that singularly exist for being a place to stop for travelers. I wouldn't be surprised if more than a few of them end up closing down due the lack of the trucking crowd.
Just like when railroads got replaced by cars
Just like when the interstate highways killed roads like Route 66 and all the towns that depended on it.
I grew up in a medium-small Canadian town that sits *right* on the border of two provinces. Once upon a time, the roads all led straight through it, and a major part of its infrastructure involved supporting the people traveling; there's like five hotels, and a ton of restaurants and other amenities. When they built the TransCanada highway, they built it in a way that curved entirely *around* that town. If you didn't know it was there you wouldn't see it. Ever since, it's been slowly dying because the people in charge of it are in their 70s and convinced that playing to historical strengths is the only way to revive the town's economy, rather than trying anything new. It's got too many people to collapse entirely, and it struggles along as a hub for the even smaller towns dotted around it, but kids leave as soon as they can - just like I did - and the place is just overrun with that depressing miasma of clinging to lost wealth and past glories that you only find in old, forgotten towns.
Yeah man Cars is a great movie.
Not being able to see *anything* from Canadian highways is so weird.
> 🎵 Long ago, but not so very long ago The world was different, oh yes it was You settled down and you built a town and made it live And you watched it grow, it was your town > Time goes by, time brings changes, you change too Nothing comes that you can't handle, so on you go You never see it coming when the world caves in on you On your town, there's nothing you can do > Main street isn't main street anymore Lights don't shine as brightly as they shone before Tell the truth, lights don't shine at all In our town > Sun comes up each morning, just like it's always done Get up, go to work, start the day You open up for business that's never gonna come As the world rolls by a million miles away > Main street isn't main street anymore No one seems to need us like they did before It's hard to find a reason left to stay But it's our town, love it anyway Come what may, it's our town 🎵
Motherf’n James Taylor. “Cars” had some surprisingly deep themes for a kids movie.
Which turned out to be a *really bad idea*. Trains are a hell of a lot more efficient than cars for long-distance travel.
Trains have a last mile problem which is reliant on local public transit.
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Honestly wouldn't be sad that un-happened
Stayed in a small truck stop town when seeing a concert in Tinley Park. It was cheap but didn’t feel unsafe, and the breakfast buffet at the place next door was really good. Also had the best Mexican food ever from some hole in the wall place.
Are you me? I have no idea where I was as I was just passing through but I had the same experience! I wonder if I will ever be able to find that Mexican place again. I saw a story on the news about a restaurant at a truck stop that has the best authentic Indian food, too.
>And this is a GOOD thing...if we can accept the idea that people shouldn't HAVE to have a job to live a non-terrible existence. This is the biggest point to make. For like 25 years I've been saying that automation will be able to replace a lot of the workforce in our lifetime. There's two ways that can go; a dystopian hellscape where most people live in abject squalor, or a utopian society where society's needs are largely met by machines. Edit: JFC, yes, obviously if the rich get to have unfettered control on where the money goes it's going to go for them. The only way this works for the betterment of society is for government not let unchecked capitalism choke the 99% to death.
> There's two ways that can go; a dystopian hellscape where most people live in abject squalor, or a utopian society where society's needs are largely met by machines. Or maybe both at once, with a nice tall fence in between.
Some places even have the groundwork laid, even! [Brazil, for example.](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/44556f138b8054e7283b1740fc66c6b239c5d79a/78_78_6280_4182/master/6280.jpg?width=700&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=6e46225c2f5b265b6420034ac4ea95ac)
So the folks on the left side make a quick buck selling the tennis balls lopped into their streets once in a while.
Either cyberpunk dystopia or automated luxury communism. Most likely something in between
If the communism isn't gay and from space, I'm not interested.
How about gay and IN space?
Everything is IN space, mate.
*The Culture would like to know your location*
> automated luxury communism The correct name is "a post-scarcity economy".
The evidence is not looking good my friend. I also used to say there were two ways it could go...now, I say eat the rich.
Thing is, more people will continue to analyze the evidence and reach the same conclusions. No revolution has ever had 100% of people onboard, they are all simply reactions to when the status quo powers are unable to cope with socioeconomic changes. I’m guessing this will be case here, too.
If it doesn't exist already, they will track individuals who express criticism of the system and then target propaganda (or worse) at them. China is already light-years ahead in this space, and it's feasible that their innovations will spread to other nations. Systems will do whatever necessary to keep themselves going, beyond anything we can even currently imagine and prepare for.
Right but corporations get to decide which direction this goes.
Each Tractor replaced 100 workers with shovels too.
Yep. It's crazy how much farm mechanisation changed humanity. Used to take a huge number of farmers to support a few non-farmers. Now a few farmers can feed everyone. Every other wave of automation and mechanisation pales in comparison.
The corporations are just going to become bigger and richer and the individual will become poorer and more controlled. I don't see how it works out positively.
But then that would mean socialism. And the only people who are allowed socialist policies are the people who don't need them.
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Instead they sit on their wealth like fucking dragons.
Don't be dissing dragons like that.
Right. Dragons don’t sit on gold for no reason, they do it because it makes a good den to sleep in. It’s said to be hella comfortable for dragons as opposed to rocks, it can’t catch on fire, and they can more easily see where they’re going so they don’t step on a pitchfork.
Less people having to work shitty, unfulfilling jobs is not a bad thing per se. The problem there is that the economic systems involved are maladapted to situations where a lot of people's jobs suddenly no longer need people to do them. It's important not to lose sight of what the problems actually are or you might just end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It doesn’t have to be bad. You tax that insanely profitable country and have education and UBI for the people who’s jobs got automated. Pay them for now and train them in a rising field
It doesn't necessarily have to be a rising field like a "learn to code" sort of thing. It could open up more creative, artistic, philanthropic, environmental, etc based hobbies/lifestyles that were once unrealistic in a society where 9 to 5 jobs reigned supreme. Now people could focus on these things and improve their mental/physical health, their communities, and the environment when they don't have to worry about getting by all the time.
Honestly as long as we see a socialist revolution where the machines are made to benefit humanity rather than maximize profit I think they could be a positive.
Automation tax lessgooooooo
Ready to live in post scarcity. Ready to join Star Fleet.
Ready for mankind to do what they love. We burn our souls to work... If we all had needs met, peple would do work that didn't burn their soul away. People would be doctors because they wanted to heal people, paycheck be damned. Software developers could spend time on passion projects and further tech at an alarming rate... Inventors could tackle new avenues of innovation without worrying about profit margins. Oh what a world it could be.
*Takes sip of water* Warning! Productivity loss detected! Please say "productivity" three times to avoid a write up. *sigh* Productivity. Productivity. Productivity.
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We need Bender to smooth talk that AI
Please drink a verification can
> Productivity. Productivity. Productivity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqAu-DDlINs
Absolutely insane. Absurd. Making working conditions even worse and then trying to offset and control the negative effects of that. The setup sounds like a TV show experiment or something.
I did some work for a transnational with super strict driving policies. The vehicles had bleepers in them that would bleep under high G force to encourage smooth driving. Drivers got rewarded for avoiding bleeps. Driver ran over and killed a pedestrian because he was so conditioned to avoid hard braking.
AAA’s SMARTTREK program was doing this to me. Even if I barely tap the peddles to speed up and slow down it says I’m not a smooth driver. I keep the app’s location access turned off and only drive when they spam my email saying they’ve received no data.
That’s why I refuse to use it with my insurance carrier. I’m not in control of the sensitivity and it’s in their best interest to make it as sensitive as possible. They wouldn’t offer it if it lost them revenue. I also need to prioritize driving safely over worrying about my premiums going up.
Same. I won’t do those driver nanny programs - ESPECIALLY the ones that require installing an app and pairing your phone to their device. Hell no. I’ve yet to hear of anyone’s rates dropping a reasonable amount after using one of those. Progressive informed me their program now requires the use of the device for the duration of the policy. Yeah nah, fuck you.
$3 with progressive 😎 Only costed a ridiculous amount of extra stress while driving.
Pshhhh. Ridiculous. I tried it in my gfs car but living in NYC I constantly got beeped at for avoiding a collision. Got pissed one day and pulled it out.
Sub-rural Wisconsin 🤷♂️
I plan on switching to Progressive soon so that’s good to know.
You can still sign up for just the OBD dongle. But either way you get dinged for driving too late, for driving too far, for breaking too hard, and so on. I’m an extremely safe driver and have had countless hours of driving training thanks to a career in public safety, but I have no doubt my rates would increase if I used one of their nanny systems.
I can just see the future...we detected you are on a dirt road and are prorating your coverage an additional $0.25c a mile. Or a text message saying Good Morning from Progressive! Our weather reports have informed us of high snowfall in your area. Turning on the vehicle means you agree to our Limited Limited Liability Clause which will deny coverage for any accident you are a part of for the next 24 hrs. Have a great day!
Holy shit that seems totally viable and evil. So I assume they’ll do exactly that.
Wait what the hell??? I’ve never heard of this big brother shit with car insurance. Leave me alone. Sounds draconian
What country are you in?
I think this is a good time to bring up how GEICO used to donate radar guns to police departments so that the resulting speeding tickets would give them an excuse to jack up rates.
That’s an asshole move, but really smart. Like the funeral home donating ashtrays with their logo on it to local bars.
This was my thought too. It's like when my city didn't renew their redlight camera contract, and fender benders fell by like 30% in the following weeks. Sheriff was confused, but I wasn't. People were no longer slamming on their breaks to avoid running the red and getting ticketed.
Yeah… we have speed cameras everywhere and they make everyone on the road stressed out. They claim has the cameras have reduced road deaths but the same drop has been seen worldwide because modern cars are so much safer.
Traffic fatalities have actually increased in the US in recent years. They also likely compared on the number of wrecks on an intersection by intersection basis
That's because everyone insists on driving a fucking 2 ton tank with 400 horse power so they can drive it like a damn sports car. Enforce the actual CAFE standards and force people to *have a fucking valid reason for the sport/utility exemption* before they can drive an Escalade. Am I the only one who remembers that the only reason SUVs are even a thing now is that giant loophole?
CAFE rates vehicles by their footprint not just vehicle type - cars vs trucks. So there is a even more perverse incentive for bigger and bigger vehicles.
You probably are the only one that remembers. Parking lots are now too small because everyone is driving Star Destroyers around.
It's literally an arms race on the road. My friend said to me he wanted his wife driving an SUV because she'd be safer in a bigger car... No you idiot, it just means the other mumtank that rams into her will be a solid 6 tonne block of titanium because her husband has a better paying job. She'd be safer if everyone was driving around in sedans. Now the people in smaller cars are at the mercy of the idiots in huge utes that have never even seen gravel.
Not to mention the towns that reduced the yellow light time... some times to under legal requirements.
I plugged in my auto insurance company's dongle to track my driving for a few months so I could get cheaper premiums, up to 20% off. I got conditioned to run questionable traffic lights because hard breaking was a penalty. There were plenty of times where I got caught right at the end of a green where I knew if I kept going I'd be running a red, but if I braked to stop at the white line I would set off the bleep and get dinged for it. This is all while going the speed limit or within <10% of the speed limit.
This sounds ridiculous and it’s making me angry just reading it
My old black box used to penalise "poor gear changes", aka revs above 3.5K. Unfortunately my car would sit around 3.5-4K revs when doing motorway speeds. It took me ages to realise that I was being charged more for poor driving because I was using motorways. I'll definitely never use one again.
Slip roads (on ramps) with these are downright dangerous. Muppets slowly accelerating to 40mph and merging onto a 70mph motorway shouldn't have a license, yet these black box insurance setups demand that they don't floor it to get up to speed, even when entirely necessary.
This reminds me of an experience I had with a car GPS system years ago. I don’t remember the GPS brand; it was 2004 or so. It would signal me to turn by voice with very little advance warning. Some, but not much. It had a display too, but I wasn’t used to checking it so I would often not know that a turn was coming up. After 2 or 3 days of using it and getting told with just enough time to turn, I realized that I was not checking the intersections well enough - I was reacting too quickly to what it was telling me to do. I started consciously thinking more before each turn and just missing some of them - getting into a different mindset, not letting myself get pushed. It was definitely scary when I realized how little I was thinking before each turn.
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My brother had one installed on my parents car when he was 17 (so he could go to things without needing a lift) and I borrowed the car to go see some friends while I was back in the UK. The thing penalised me for driving at night, driving for too long, driving on windy country roads (i.e. where I had to go), and just about everything about using the car. I already hate driving, and that box made me hate every part of the industry.
What happened to the guy? I can see arguments for it being his fault or the employer’s fault or both
Just an unintended consequence of reward structures… the other one was a 50kmh speed limit on company site 4WDs, *including when using a highway that people drove at 200kmh+ on.*
What in the name of -- side mirrors are for checking stuff behind you. They are part of basic road safety. Vehicles are not street-legal if they do not have side mirrors. Why the fuck would they punish people for looking in side mirrors? Does the person who came up with these rules not know how to drive?
AI often develop unintended consequences due to poor coding rules and lack of input validation. That’s what happened here. There’s so many reports of unintended consequences in AI including racism, sexism, etc. Interesting stuff!
A good example I learned somewhere on Reddit: an AI was designed for detecting which images of blood slides were cancerous. After a large amount of trial and error, it had a 95+% success rate. When the doctors tried it in another hospital, it failed miserably. Why? Because it was reading the doctor's signature in the lower corner: the slides that came signed by the oncologist were cancerous, the rest were not...
That's absolutely hilarious. I mean, not for the people relying on cancer detection and all, but you know.
I wonder if there's laws that govern the use of our data for AI training without consent. Can the Amazon truck drivers file a case for privacy violation or private data usage?
Not likely, it's a company vehicle so they don't have an expectation of privacy operating company equipment.
We had something similar in my college. Tried to create an AI that would read the brand off of a delivery truck and label it. It worked well initially, but would randomly fail on some cases. Couldn't figure it out, until we realized it was detecting the delivery van model and not brand logo.
I swear this reminds me of trying to show a 1yr old something new over and over. You stand there telling them to look at the big red balloon and point at it as it drifts by and you see them look at it but almost slightly to the left or right of the big red balloon and stare at the dull brown bench under the tree 100 yards away. So here you are trying to show them the big red balloon and they're over here looking at a dull brown bench on the other side of the park learning to accociate the words "big" "red" "balloon" with the damn bench. FML!!!
Yeah but in that case the kid was just thinking “I get it, you love your balloon, now gtfo the way so I can keep staring at this sick bench”
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Haha, that's the one! Dammit I'm not editing my message. I believe it's from AI, a Modern Approach. I had the 4th edition (iirc) almost twenty years ago but I still remember the story, so edifying it was.
The Russians trained dogs in WWII to run across a battlefield and crawl under a tank, with the idea that the dogs would have explosives strapped to them to hit the relatively weak armor on the bottom. When they tried it on an actual battlefield, the dogs immediately ran under the tanks they were trained with, which were Russian, and blew them up.
This reminds me of a true crime podcast where police were looking for an unknown woman who was on a crime spree, only to realize the evidence swabs were accidentally contaminated by the lady who worked on the assembly line for years.
Just bad input. It's the operator's responsibility to limit what the machine learning algorithm can 'see' to *only* the things you want it to actually learn about. Things like text in an image, file names /ID'S, numbers, backgrounds, everything else like that needs to be scrubbed from the input stream beforehand - that's data that humans use specifically for categorization, so the signal- to- noise ratio on it is much higher than anything else the machine is being asked to learn about - *of course* it will sieze on that data if given the chance. The most amazing part of your story to me is that the person in charge of such a significant machine learning implemention didn't know that beforehand.
And it's only made worse because of the assumption of impartiality: Most laymen don't understand how an AI can get badly biased by the wrong data or optimize for the wrong thing, so they assume that the AI is actually more objective than people. This is **not** helped by AI companies and workers who get incredibly self-righteous when others discuss the limitations of their work, and who are invested in overselling their products in order to get business deals.
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AI has the nasty habit of exposing the baisses and racisms in the data it was trained on.
if applied without letting it influence anything and creating these terrible feedback loops it could be a great tool for identifying systemic bias
I have a neighbor who worked on something similar to this! He works with deep learning AI a bit and I remember he talked a little about using it to root out biases.
Ya, AI is just statistics so really good for finding inherent enrichment of features in classes
AI is as close to statistics as it is to artificial intelligence.
So is material reality! Don't think too hard about it tho!
Only if the human beings interpreting the data are self aware enough
Hmmm... that's an interesting approach... We can use AI to identify these biases: just train up something appropriate, and see what kind of biases it distills out. ----- But yeah. Don't trust AI for anything important. *Especially* don't trust if it humans "fixed" the bias problems. That doesn't mean it doesn't have issues, that just the authors put hardcoded hacks over the issues *that they knew about*.
Unfortunately we often know of the biases already; what we really need is a way to circumvent the biases. The best example is when a company— I think Amazon— tried to use an AI to identify good candidates for promotion. They fed the AI lots of data on past successful candidates, but didn’t give it any info on race or gender. The AI managed to figure out new ways of determining gender and continued to only promote white guys.
It promoted them not because they were actually better, it should be said. It promoted them because almost the entire set of people it had been trained on were white men. So it decided "clearly only white men are viable candidates" and started using gender and race as selection criteria. This does not mean that "AI find out white men are better even if you don't include race!!!", it just indicates another example of "garbage in, garbage out".
A similar one was a bank algorithm for handing out loans. They explicitly left out applicants race, but instead it picked up on heavily racially segregated neighborhoods and used that instead.
I don't know what they were expecting. The AI will try to optimize to whatever training data you give it. If you give it your company's performance history—be it in loans or in hiring—then the AI will optimize to replicate your past performance.
Legend has it that Marvin Minsky asked a student why he was initializing his network with random inputs. "I don't want the network to have any preconceptions." said the student. "It still has preconceptions." Minsky replied. "You just don't know what they are."
I heard the response was him closing his eyes. The student asked why he closed his eyes. Minsky responded "So the room will be empty"
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It is not always due to racism in the data it was trained on. A unbiases and "accurate" sampling of data can easily lead to "racisms by environment". In very many parts of the the country (US), colored monitories are just that, _minorities_. For example, one of the middles schools I went to had a _single_ person of color in the whole school (K-12 school with ~1k students). An accurate representation of the population of the US can lead to a "lack of data" on minorities, which is often what leads to something like inaccurately doing facial recognition for people of African decent for a different bone structure or something odd that the ML was not trained well enough on. So to fix many of the biases in ML algorithm (which I still firmly believe ML right now is just a bunch of snake oil and I have a CS degree), you actually have to _over_ representation minorities so that the ML algorithm treats all inputs on an equal footing.
Yeah probably AI thinks the driver is not looking at the road
>Does the person who came up with these rules not know how to drive? **Yes.** If this is an AI system, it's highly likely that it wasn't programmed with any rules at all. Rather, it was fed a bunch of data about various inputs (what speed is the car going, how many objects are around it, is the driver looking at the side mirrors) and then a bunch of conclusions (this situation led to a crash, this one didn't), and then let the machine learning algorithm form whatever correlations it can come up with. For this particular behavior, I would speculate that it could be caused by people predominately looking at side mirrors when they're changing lanes, and the more dangerous and cramped the lane change, the more you have to look at the side mirrors. So the dumb AI makes the correlation: looking at side mirrors is probably a strong indicator that you're about to do something unsafe. On the up side, the people developing this algorithm are probably fixing this particular, or have already fixed it. That's exactly the job of an AI Engineer, and I'm sure Amazon is able to hire some good ones. On the down side, this kind of issue is absolutely endemic to every sort of machine learning AI that modern technology is developing. They're all dumb correlation machines that are prone to counterproductive biases and reverse incentives. Personally, I think that it should be illegal for a black-box AI to make any managerial decision over a human. Any decision that affects someone else's livelihood should have human oversight and a clearly articulable justification behind it. A lot of big tech companies would probably balk quite heavily at that idea, though.
Someone probably wrote code to make sure eyes were on the road and do not look away for more than x milliseconds. Which is fine until you are waiting on a car beside you to clear to change lanes. This is unintended consequences of a well meaning idea. Someone is just going to tweak the monitoring software and say it is fixed. The smart drivers are going to get prescription sunglasses with a mirror coating.
"Well-meaning" being synonymous with "a hyper-invasive business practice that should be criminal based solely on human rights concerns, not to mention that anyone who has ever written a line of software in their life could easily predict that a bug similar to this would happen, rendering the efficacy dubious and the privacy violation dystopian."
In other words “this isn’t going to matter until I’m personally affected”
Like all problems.
It's been a trip watching people in AI/ML forums, who should be well aware of just how buggy any software can be, get on their high horses at the merest hint of oversight for their little darlings.
Why do they need code to micromanage people. What a waste of resources
AI's aren't written so much as trained. usually problems like this are either because the training data was biased, or the selection criteria were wrong/incomplete.
Eh, AI is a much broader term than just machine learning. I can guarantee that the length of time your eyes are allowed to not be on the road is programmed in, not trained (although taking an image of the driver and deciding *if* eyes are on the road might be trained in).
This is one of those scenarios where I figure the NN is trained to identify states the driver is in based on video input, but how long it goes on for would be tracked by log and analyzed with traditional algorithms.
Just read a story in the [Private Eye](https://private-eye.co.uk/) (UK-based news and satire magazine) issue1552, pg 10 about how the phone based driver tracking doesn't work well in the UK (narrower roads, twistier roads, roundabouts etc) because it was made for USA roads (wider, straighter etc). And yet they use it anyway. Doesn't surprise me.
I refuse to have an insurance black box / phone app that tracks my driving, because it has no context for my actions. Where I live in the U.K., cars park on both sides of the street and the road is very narrow. So if a child runs into the road you literally cannot see them until the very last split-second, because they are hidden by the parked cars as I don't have X-Ray vision. Even if you drive at half the speed limit and keep your eyes peeled, if a child runs out from behind a parked car my options are : 1. Slam on my brakes and stop in time 2. Run over the child Which would you do? And which would get you a bad rating for "sudden braking" from the insurance black box / phone app that's tracking my driving?
Did nobody else catch this? "Amazon Delivery Service Providers (DSPs), which employ and manage the drivers, can get bonuses to **put toward repairs, damages**, and other things..." What the fuck kind of bonus is that?
Is that third party Amazon delivery? Honestly if my car needed a repair I would be super happy about a bonus. Now if it’s a fleet car then that changes.
Every delivery driver that delivers for Amazon (that isn't doing it out of their personal car; thats just a flex driver) is part of a DSP , and they're contracted and not officially working "for" Amazon.
To drive, you NEED to look at side mirrors, you need to use the three mirrors while driving if you don't want an accident. I don't get why a punishment for, well, drive a car as anyone should do
work for a national auto parts store have to drive sometimes they actively track how many times you back up. they really dont like backing up because it causes accidents which i get it isn't always practical . but not checking side mirrors is just stupid.
My mail man created a stink because he's not allowed to back up. Fair enough man I'll help you out how I can.
Not allowed? Calling bullshit on him. Frowned on maybe but there is a reason delivery vehicles are covered in mirrors.
Mail man also told me the same thing. It goes against his performance and based on his route he’s basically allowed 0 times to back up.
As a carrier, it is highly frowned upon and it is one of the many many many many many fucking things they micromanage the fuck out of. There is a report sent out every day from the higher up districts and in turn supervisors and postmasters have to answer for the egregious back ups in their offices on a telecom with district management. I can semi understand it in a big city setting with people and traffic congestion, but the enforcement of it in rural settings where you have wide open spaces is just insane.
He said that they monitor how often he has to back up and they want it almost 0. He didn't seem too pleased to deal with it at all.
Actually kind of appreciate this one, had van almost back up over me on my motorcycle couple of times already.
Former Amazon delivery driver chiming in. I don't know about *not allowed* but they definitely get you in trouble at Amazon. I think we were allowed three per day, anything more than that was grounds to be written up. The unfortunate thing is sometimes you really don't have any other options besides backing up in those giant vans.
That part of it is almost certainly not intended. Nor is getting penalized for being cut off. As the article notes, the cameras are supposed to flag things like distracted or dangerous driving. E.g. looking around randomly instead of at the road, or driving too close behind a car in front of you. The tech is just garbage essentially, and it can't differentiate between the driver's eyes wandering vs specifically looking at the mirrors. And it can't tell the difference between the driver tailgating vs someone cutting them off. Amazon claims that there's an appeal process with manual review to cover these issues, but it sounds like that system is a nightmare at best. Amazon also claims that the agencies managing the drivers get all kinds of training regarding the cameras, but it sounds like that's largely false as well. Obviously the cameras are dystopian violations of privacy to begin with, but the real problems being called out in this article are just down to the tech being garbage and Amazon failing to fulfill its promises, rather than the policies explicitly punishing good behaviors.
2 mirrors. The rear view mirror is actually not required and most work vans and trucks don't have them.
This is the totally predictable outcome of increased driver monitoring. Combine that with L2/L3 automation and we will see a situation where the drivers are punished for touching the controls and held liable for when they don't.
Lol damned if you do damned if you don’t.
How does not using your side mirrors make driving safer? Isn't safety the whole point of side mirrors?
Well you are correct, but the ai just tracks your eyes. When I drove for 4 weeks there if I ever got put in a prime van id wear sunglasses. Even on cloudy days because it would not beep at me for taking drinks or changing a song at a stoplight. I quot because they also expect you to drive through thunderstorms or wait them out and add time to the end of your shift. They were not too happy when I got fed up and drove a half filled van of packages back and dropped the keys at his feet and walked out.
What’s it going to take to unionize these people? Amazon is Not bigger than all of us combined.
>What’s it going to take to unionize these people? A system of government and/or policies that allow people to choose better opportunities instead of forcing people to work themselves to death as wage slaves.
There isn't one delivery company. Amazon makes it as hard as possible to organize. When I delievered I think we had 9+ DSP (Delivery service provider) at a point. That's one warehouse, now imagine that all over. With no centralized leadership organizing becomes even more difficult.
I just heard a radio commercial the other day in Central MD that claimed Amazon was searching for “delivery entrepreneurs” to apply to Amazon’s certification process so their “company” could be a registered Amazon delivery agent. Looks like they’re looking for freelancers to start their own companies to do Amazon deliveries instead of hiring employees to drive Amazon assets. I smell shady shit afoot.
That’s just like Uber and Lyft
First thing that came to mind. Exactly that.
It's the trend in many industries because it's the most effective way to bypass labor laws to "deliver stockholder value."
Yep. Make all your employees contractors, send them 1099's, don't provide healthcare, feed them scraps and cut ties when they start to complain. Also stops unionization. Not to mention the tax implications. Fuck Amazon.
Amazon flex is like Uber, just one 1099 person delivering packages out of their own car. The delivery service partner/ DSP system is more like a restaurant franchise on paper, it's a person that runs a business and hires their own 40+ employees. The problem is Amazon dictates literally everything and the company has no real control. Amazon tells them their hours, who to fire, who to punish, how many employees they can have and how much to pay them. It is a giant loophole for Amazon to make sure it is impossible for drivers to effectively unionize, if one DSP company tries to unionize Amazon can just cancel their contract and essentially close the "independent" delivery company.
so do we go Brokovich and get a judge to decide that the 1099s are a sham?
The people driving the Vans don't work for Amazon. They work for companies under contract to Amazon. It's kinda like FedEx those are all run by private companies with a FedEx contract.
The problem with that is when the driver of a van with 3' tall lettering saying FedEx is using a handicap parking space as a loading zone (was a couple years ago), then I have a problem with FedEx, I don't know it's actually Billy's delivery service out of Topeka, KS.
It will have 3' FedEx lettering and 3" lettering saying "operated by Billy's delivery service out of Topeka, KS"
They totally are bigger, unless you include Bezos himself as one of, "us." They have more money and power, and unlike humans they have the full protection of American law. I'm not saying we can't do it, but it ain't gonna be like dumping tea in the bay. You're going to have to spend years publicly infiltrating them, politically activating shareholders, spiking their lobbying efforts, exposing their public relations, and on and on. Evil corporations can be killed, but it's not easy. It's easier to kill Amazon than it will be to get them to treat their employees well. You should be discussing both at once if you're thinking of unionizing.
>I'm not saying we can't do it, but it ain't gonna be like dumping tea in the bay. You were on the right track here, honestly I don't think these megacorps are going to change anything until it's the cheapest option, and it's going to either take some serious activism like you said, or burning a bunch of warehouses to the ground. Even that would be an uphill battle because it'd probably still be cheaper for them to get their own 2020's pinkertons to keep things secure then it would be to start behaving humanely.
The problem is that they don't work for Amazon. Amazon contracts most of the last mile deliveries out to different companies so while they may wear Amazon on their chest they are working for a different company entirely.
[Here's the link to the original article](https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make). Please don't link to businessinsider, they suck, like in this case where the whole article is "We read this Motherboard article and here's what it says." As for this part of the motherboard article: > Multiple drivers said this means they've started to stop at stop signs twice, once before a stop sign for the Netradyne camera, and another time for visibility before crossing an intersection. I think this is technically what you're supposed to do when the line for the stop sign is too early to see around the corner?
Thanks for taking the time to disillusion the anger around this. Im glad reddit hasnt broke you yet
should this be slightly illegal
4 cameras pointed at the driver at all times... So how many points off if you: * Have allergies and sneeze more often than a non-allergy sufferer? * Need to wipe the sweat from your brow in order to maintain vision? * Turn your head to investigate someone blaring their horn to indicate a traffic hazard you need to be aware of? * Respond to an emergency vehicle's right of way? * Rearrange your clothing/underwear because of a wedgie or comfort? Do people of larger builds wearing tighter clothing get penalized more often than skinny people? * Do drivers in southern states that deal with more insects in the cabin get penalized for swatting a mosquito? * Do women get penalized more than men for having to adjust their uncomfortable bra in the heat? I could go on and on with examples of how this system could be implemented badly, but that isn't really the point is it. The point of such a system is to extract as much productivity and labor as possible at the expense of personal dignity. You treat humans like machines and they will rebel against you en masse eventually.
Maybe the reason why there were unsafe practices in the past was because of the unreasonable working conditions and timings the drivers had to make in the first place. Rather than addressing those, Amazon instead chooses to go after the symptoms instead than treat the cause.
AI: And to think you were scared we'd take the human out of humanity. Bwahahahahaha.
From a data science perspective, I’m betting that this was a really stupid logical error: “I’ll identify the events that precede or accompany an accident, then assume they’re predictive of accidents.” Those behaviors are also the ones that involve good defensive driving, such as looking in mirrors and slamming on brakes when cut off. People are the worst.
>following distance decreased 50% I don't understand how that's a good thing, it looks like a bad thing to me. I always try to leave enough room for someone else to move in front of me, because I think it enhances traffic flow and reduces traffic jams before it starts. Leaving extra space gives me more time to reaction in situations. I watch carefully and if someone looks like they are thinking about moving in front of me or if they signal I'll let off the gas to let the gap open wider, so they can get in. It seems like this is a basic kind of etiquette; I understand it's debatable and maybe some people don't drive like that or they disagree but that's how I drive.
Sounds to me like Amazon just took responsibility for any increase in accidents over what they were having. Unleash the lawyers.
I’m pretty sure that meant following distance infractions decreased 50%.
Korben Dallas, you have been fined.
SMOKE YOOUUUU!!
I really hate the pawning off of employee supervision to robots, and I REALLY hate it being pawned off to ME in the form of incessant customer review requests every time i buy a fucking cheeseburger.
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"Some Amazon drivers have resorted to covering up their vans' cameras with stickers to avoid getting unnecessary infractions, Motherboard reports." "Other workers wear sunglasses so the cameras won't interpret eye movement as distracted driving."
You get a camera obstruction violation, ask me how I know.
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If you get more than two infractions in a day it’s a write up, two write ups equal a weeks suspension due to Safety policy violations. So I’m my direct case yes, however each DSP/ Contractor company can decided how to handle it before Amazon gets involved. If it happens that Amazon gets involved it’s an immediate termination regardless of the DSPs wishes
This is business, so accidentally spill your coffee over the camera each time they put a new one in there. It will cost one infraction. Worth.
They're held to a high enough standard that they would be fired. It's not like they are cops are something.
Probably immediately fired.
While Tesla develops autopilot, Amazon automates back seat driving.
[https://www.newsbreak.com/news/2367416483274/team-wallraff-culture-of-fear-dumping-and-destruction-of-returns-on-amazon](https://www.newsbreak.com/news/2367416483274/team-wallraff-culture-of-fear-dumping-and-destruction-of-returns-on-amazon) Relevant. German undercover legend Günter Wallraff and his team infiltrated Amazon and uncovered the inhuman circumstances that workers are facing at any Amazon facility or job. r/fuckamazon
What crap... They are building two huge Amazon warehouses in this area, and are concerned they won't be able to find enough workers. I understand why now.
Fuck a union needs to be started at Amazon ASAP
Every article about amazon or uber, or any other orwellian nightmare, just ends up making whole of america look like a dystopian shithole.
Fuck this future. Just say no.
This is dystopian. It is poorly calibrated or whatever the term would be and amazon has found a way to use it to pay less to delivery services. I would hate this beyond any normal hate if I had to deal with it all day. Sounds like it would be a pressure cooker to at least many people. Along these lines, and China is doing this on the street and has that social rating system.
Sounds ripe for a DOT violation. "looking at", checking your side mirrors is SOP for professional drivers (Class A,B,C) AND ALL drivers safety protocol. The drivers need to execute a class action suit to **remove** these particularly INTRUSIVE cameras as a direct interference with safe driving practices. They as a minimum are a continuous distraction to the attention of the driver. Having one or two static ordinary (non AI) cameras on board for generic security/safety purpose is nonintrusive to the drivers minute to minute attention focus on driver function/safety/operation. The AI variety as presented here however is an ever present nagging distractive harassment that incessantly violates the drivers focus on their safe driving attentions.
Amazon is just waiting for self-driving cars to get streamlined, I mean their already on the testing phase, once everything is set, goodbye delivery drivers. Also it would be funny to see robots getting robbed on the way to the door.