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Amazon uses AI to monitor union risk in UK warehouses

116 points • by DeepLogin • today at 4:04 PM • 41 comments • view on HN

Comments

advael • today at 5:12 PM

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

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sdcfgy • today at 5:15 PM

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

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pera • today at 5:20 PM

> I am optimistic about the future of AI at Amazon

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

Is this really the society we want?

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ck2 • today at 5:54 PM

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

it should be a protected freedom to associate and expression

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

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

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bediger4000 • today at 6:16 PM

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

metalman • today at 5:10 PM

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

hndhyc0bdt • today at 5:03 PM

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

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slop • today at 5:29 PM

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

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

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

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