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Years after patenting the concept, Amazon admits putting workers in a cage would be a bad idea:
Warehouse workers confined in cages? That's the dark vision evoked by an essay delving into the worries that come along with the development of artificial-intelligence devices such as the Amazon Echo speaker.
"Anatomy of an AI System" was published on Friday by the AI Now Institute and Share Lab — and it's already gotten a rise from the executive in charge of Amazon's distribution system, who says the cage concept never ended up being used.
The 7,300-word essay was written by Kate Crawford, who is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research as well as co-founder and co-director of New York University's AI Now Institute; and Vladan Joler, director of the Share Foundation and a professor at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia.
Crawford and Joler focused on the human and industrial angles behind the Echo device, rather than strictly on the computer science behind artificial intelligence. The topics range from the extraction of raw materials that go into the electronics, to the labor that's required to build the devices, to the roles played by Amazon Web Services, Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing network and the Amazon distribution system.
"At every level, contemporary technology is deeply rooted in and running on the exploitation of human bodies," the authors wrote.
[...] Amazon's inventors said the device was designed to keep workers safe if they had to cross paths with warehouse robots that could pose an injury hazard — for example, when picking up fallen items, dealing with a malfunctioning robot or crossing an off-limits area to get to a restroom.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Osamabobama on Monday September 10 2018, @04:18PM
The summary doesn't really summarize anything about the cage, just the part where it's a bad idea. This paragraph from the article sheds a little light on it:
(emphasis added)
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