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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @10:22AM (1 child)
> and believes the rate at which associates have contracted Covid-19 is lower than that of the general US population.
I should hope so. I'm assuming that "the general US population" includes everyone, and includes, for example, high risk groups like nursing home residents and health care workers. Just about any other occupation should be lower risk than the overall average?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @12:17PM
Contracting, not dying from it. They are a public facing occupation, I would expect a higher risk of catching it.
Also, notice he said "he believes" the rate is lower, a sure tell for a corporate lie. If it was true he would have just stated it. He can state under oath that he believes the moon is made of blue cheese if he likes. "Beliefs" are meaningless.
(Score: 5, Touché) by MostCynical on Tuesday June 02 2020, @10:36AM (1 child)
isn't that called a taser? [taser.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @12:04PM
Came to this story just for this comment. 10/10 was not disappointed. Thank you for choosing the non-lethal option.
What's funnier than "the people of Walmart"? "The people of Walmart" break dancing to 40kV!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday June 02 2020, @02:26PM (5 children)
Instead of using shite AI technology to prevent shoplifting at self checkout points, do away with self checkout and employ real cashiers instead. You'll give someone a job they need and you'll prevent (most) shoplifting at the same time, you fucking cheapstakes...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @02:51PM (1 child)
I never use self-checkout for that reason. It eliminates jobs.
(Score: 4, Touché) by epitaxial on Tuesday June 02 2020, @03:26PM
Walmart is saving money by not paying cashiers. They are not passing those savings onto me for doing their work. If self checkouts gave you a discount I'd use them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by XivLacuna on Tuesday June 02 2020, @04:01PM
My local Walmart encouraged people to use self checkout by only leaving the cash registers staffed by the slowest, most incompetent people they could find. It unfortunately worked. They had the displaced staff instead work on curbside delivery.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 02 2020, @04:01PM
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @11:40PM
Or, you can have both and offer customers the choice of whether or not they want to deal with a human clerk or not.
In fact, as a result of COVID-19 and the social distancing requirements, I've had it with stores that won't install these things. Market Basket, a large grocery store chain in the northeast, refuses to install them for the exact reasons you cite. Hannaford, their main competitor here, has 4-6 self-checkouts alongside the usual number of manned checkouts.
Due to social distancing requirements, Market Basket now only has 3-4 checkouts open, even during their busiest times. This turns a 5-minute shopping trip into over an hour of standing in one of three lines that snake through the entire store. Hannaford has 3-4 manned checkouts open--and their 4-6 self-checkouts. I've not had a single delay getting in and out of Hannaford due to social distancing. The lines at the self-checkouts look just the same.
Force your customers to use manned checkouts rather than offer the option of self-checkouts, and then create this kind of absolute mess as a result of social distancing. Fuck Market Basket.
(Score: 2) by tizan on Tuesday June 02 2020, @09:33PM
During the pandemic they have enclosed their liquor behind section lock and key...you have to press a button and wait for a humaaan to come and unlock it and carry it to the cashier !!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @09:34PM
Comments like this where people give absolute instead of population relative figures, especially without some other value for comparison, should set off people's bullshit detectors - because they're almost always bullshit. And indeed this follows the pattern. WalMart employs 1.5 million people in the US alone. Our *national* death toll attribute to corona is 326 deaths/million [worldometers.info]. So if "WalMart associates" were tracking just based off the national averages, we'd expect to have seen about 489 deaths of WalMart associates.
If they've genuinely had only 20 deaths, then WalMart is doing an unbelievably good job of protecting their workers since that's some orders of magnitude off the national average.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday June 02 2020, @10:40PM
>at least 20 Walmart associates have now died after contracting the coronavirus
Not to downplay the coronavirus, but it really helps to have a sense of scale. How many Walmart associates do you think would have died in traffic collisions and other common causes over 6+ months in normal conditions? 20 deaths is literally nothing when rounded to the nearest tenth percent.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by nishi.b on Wednesday June 03 2020, @09:47AM
Still surprised to see how successful big companies' newspeak has been accepted as the new normal. "Associates" ? How are they "associates", they are employees; they do not have a say in how the company is run nor have a part of the shares, and they can be fired at will by their bosses. But yeah, "associates", keep this illusion of equality...