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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 02 2020, @08:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-steal-the-cake dept.

Wired is reporting that Walmart employees have serious concerns about the effectiveness of the company's anti-shoplifting "AI" technology (reprint), including unnecessarily breaking COVID-19 related social distancing guidelines.

[...] The employees said they were "past their breaking point" with Everseen, a small artificial intelligence firm based in Cork, Ireland, whose technology Walmart began using in 2017. Walmart uses Everseen in thousands of stores to prevent shoplifting at registers and self-checkout kiosks. But the workers claimed it misidentified innocuous behavior as theft, and often failed to stop actual instances of stealing.

[...] The coronavirus pandemic has given their concerns more urgency. One Concerned Home Office Associate said they worry false positives could be causing Walmart workers to break social-distancing guidelines unnecessarily. When Everseen flags an issue, a store associate needs to intervene and determine whether shoplifting or another problem is taking place. In an internal communication from April obtained by WIRED, a corporate Walmart manager expressed strong concern that workers were being put at risk by the additional contact necessitated by false positives and asked whether the Everseen system should be turned off to protect customers and workers.

Before COVID-19, "it wasn't ideal, it was a poor customer experience," the worker said. "AI is now creating a public health risk."

[...] at least 20 Walmart associates have now died after contracting the coronavirus, according to United For Respect.

[...] A spokesperson for Walmart said the company has been working diligently to protect customers and its workforce, and believes the rate at which associates have contracted Covid-19 is lower than that of the general US population.

[...] The company said it has taken a number of steps to ensure people are protected during these interactions, including regularly cleaning self-checkout kiosks and providing employees with protective equipment. In addition, workers are given handheld devices that allow them to handle most interventions from a distance, the company said.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 02 2020, @04:01PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday June 02 2020, @04:01PM (#1002202)

    The funny thing is that defenders of big business routinely argue that the reason retailers want to replace humans with machines is because those humans demand too many pay raises and occasionally say the word "union", while carefully ignoring the fact that retailers will gladly replace humans with machines even if the humans aren't complaining.

    And the reason that's the case is obvious to anyone who can do math. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that each automated checkout machine costs $500,000 more than a manned checkout register setup. That would make 250 machines come at the upfront cost of $12.5 million. Now, these automated machines still need some human care, namely 1 maintenance tech and 25 (1 per each 10 machines) in-person associates to monitor them and deal with any minor problems that might occur, at a cost of something like $800K a year (26 * $30K per person, rounded). But to have all 250 machines manned by a human costs the same maintenance tech for the problems the onsite humans can't solve, plus 250 humans, at a cost of $7.5 million. Which means that it took about 2 years for the automated machines to completely pay for themselves, and while paying the humans less might expand that out to 3-4 years, it's still going to be a good move for the company in the long run.

    And at the risk of having lots of people dismiss the argument, Karl Marx went over this in Capital over a century ago, and his logic was basically the same: Machines are always cheaper than people in the long run, so every capitalist will opt for a machine over a human to do a job if they can possibly afford the up-front cost.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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