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Autistic. Adult. ΔΘ
Agender aromantic (not ace).
Letter A aficionado.


A faceless robot-polymorph on the internet. The brainspace equivalent of a fork in the river. Artist, occasional writer, and perpetual oddity. Turtles all the way down.


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NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

the Mechanical Turk strikes again


geckonori
@geckonori

Many years ago, a few biiiig companies started to have this really neat automated phone tree system. You called in, the robot said you were allowed to ask for whatever you wanted, and then it shut up. If you said some long sentence explaining what you wanted, it somehow knew where to direct your call. Background noise? No problem. Not sure what department you need? No problem, it just knows! What a cool robot, right?

Anyway, they accomplished this using cheap human labor. Not sure if they still do this stuff today, but it seems likely, right? I worked at one of these facilities. It was a sad little office building, unlabeled and hidden between a bunch of warehouses. There was one pathetic break room and then The Computer Zone that looked like a middle school computer lab.

You sit at a computer, log in, and put on a headset. A "call" comes in. When someone tells one of those phone tree robots "Hey I need to know how to buy a ____", it sends that audio clip to your headset while simultaneously showing a bespoke array of buttons on your computer screen. The buttons represent different parts of the phone tree. "Billing", "Repairs", etc. As you listen to the audio, you click one of the buttons to direct the call to the correct part of the tree. In order to help with accuracy, 2-3 people receive the same audio clip at the same time. Whichever phone tree button got the most "votes" is where the call went.

The truly disgusting part of it all is they turned this into a competition. You could see your answer speed scores as you went through your shift. You were trying your best to direct a call before the other two people hearing the same clip as you. But if you were TOO quick on the draw and directed a call before the audio clip finished (and it was revealed the caller actually wanted something else at the last second), you were punished for rushing. FAST but not too fast. Those with higher scores on the honest-to-god leaderboard would get a slightly higher hourly wage for a given paycheck. Of course, this leaderboard constantly reset. There was no way to do well and then coast on a higher wage. You were fighting a bunch of other disgraced souls for the chance at maybe getting a few more scraps that week.

Humans crammed in a gray room getting carpal tunnel at lightning speed, all racing in the hopes of getting a bit more than minimum wage. You were listening to audio clips NON-STOP your entire shift. Rapid fire. Pain, suffering, torture, with no way to listen to music or look at your phone or talk to another human being.

And then you went home. Another day of a job well done, helping these massive corporations get a bit more wealth by talking up their cool "artificial intelligence".

I quit that job after a month. It really broke something inside me. When I walked up to the desk where the Computer Lab Warden sat, I just said "Hey I don't think I can do this anymore. I wanna quit." And no shit, the guy was like "Oh sure. Thanks for coming up to say something, most people just stop coming in one day."

I have to imagine every big innovation is like this.


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in reply to @stu's post:

I was thinking about this and I think part of the reason is that self-checkout already exists in stores, so it wouldn't have gotten them press coverage about how "weird" it is to shop there if you had to stop and tap your bag/items on an NFC tag reader, but I bet another part is that people steal from self-checkout all the time. If you know how the system works, you can figure out how to get around it, but a "magic" system that just knows what you're carrying out of the store and you don't know how, then you can't figure out how to trick it.

i'd never been to one of these places so i always just assumed it was like, scanning things as you go along and getting it charged to your card when you leave or something. the reality of it being some guys in india watching you on cctv and tallying it up by hand is such a uniquely dystopian and stone age solution to the tech magic sales pitch we got you can't help but laugh at just how absurdly bleak it is

yeah i also assumed it was something like "self-scanning as you go", which according to the article is apparently the backup plan for stores who want to use something like this in the future. Insane that this wasn't the idea from the get-go.

"Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped."

Oh my god just end me

in reply to @geckonori's post:

Mmhm mmhm, I didn’t work there but I had two friends that did. The part that always stuck out to me was the wage they advertised in all the job postings was the highest wage possible with the IVR leaderboard and only a couple of people could get that a month. And I might be misremembering this - there were multiple locations and the leaderboard was spread across all of them?

Not allowed to have your phone or anything on your person either, gotta put all your personal effects in a locker before beginning your menial button pushing job.

Yeah, the fact that it was so effective more than validated the (minimal) cost to these companies. One of the voice clips I remember hearing was some old guy saying "Yeaaaah, my [product] shit the bed." and we knew to send him to Repairs. The caller probably took it for granted, but can you imagine an actual computer knowing how to route that? Impossible.

This reminds me how a lot of "ai-generated" text stuff is just outsourced to a centre in Africa that gets paid $2 a week to edit out slurs that a search engine "accidentally" uses.

Shocking no one once again, a lot of techbros are just trying to reinvent slave labour, it's disgusting.

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