sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

apparently the plan was to use humans to train an ML system but it never ended up getting good enough to take over

the Mechanical Turk strikes again

Once in SF when it was new for the novelty and once when I was in Seattle last year because it was close to where I was staying.

Like, there were genuinely a few hours between the moment I stepped out of the store and me getting the invoice in my phone. I don’t know what’s the point of over engineering this and not hiring cashiers (or even have self checkout).

(I mean I know the point is to save enough money to not hire humans but like, clearly that was a shit bet)

Back when i worked at Google (fuck them btw. it's become a horrible place to work), I was one of several linguists on a team where our whole thing was writing questions like "Which of these two ads is more relevant to this search query?" and then sending those out to a bunch of part-time contractors who worked for a vendor in order to collect training data for Google's search ad serving algorithm.

Almost all of the English language raters were in India or the Philippines because you can pay people in those countries way less than you'd have to pay people from the US.

Raters also got hijacked sometimes to directly enforce policy, like when YouTube had an "adpocalypse" due to Elsagate, or to judge if feed ads (for endless vertical scroll on mobile) contained adult or violent or drug-related content.

So I'm confident when I say that a ton of systems that are presented as being "automated" are built on top of cheap human labor, or just are cheap human labor.

Source: I applied for a part-time remote position a couple years ago thinking to get some side cash. Before I could be hired I had to read their extensive guidelines and then rate a bunch of results. All the automated feedback I got was good, but "mysteriously" I never got past that stage (I got a rejection, then an invite to continue, and then another rejection? Bewildering). Fast forward to me learning more about how these things are trained and now I'm a liiiittle 🤔

(I know I might've just not made it in because others were more qualified, but idk, something about the depth and scale of that assessment felt shifty to me. You shouldn't give a "skills assessment" to people based on something they have to read a whole manual for, that's training and should be either assumed as part of the skillset the potential hire already has, or included as part of onboarding after they're hired, depending on how much you want your entry level salary to be. So even if it wasn't a free labor scam, it was definitely unethical and I dodged a bullet there.)

apparently the plan was to use humans to train an ML system but it never ended up getting good enough to take over

the Mechanical Turk strikes again

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.

(okay I know full well I'll be telling on myself here, so: no, I have not worked corporate retail. I've done retail, but not at a huge chain, so I'm sure the following was only news to me - but also take my word for it that i assumed this existed, I just didn't know what it was called, or that it was quite this stark)

I was at Fred Meyer today and as the cashier rang me up, I happened to notice a big red exclamation at the bottom of the register screen next to a number and the letters "IPM." i immediately guessed this was "items (scanned) per minute," because of course that would be printed on the screen in order to keep the staff continuously scared, and yes that is what it means, and yes she was failing to meet the threshold

i googled it and the first results were exactly what i expected: people saying that their bosses didn't even fucking care if the cash drawer balanced at the end of the day, nothing mattered except ipm. which is of course because their bosses don't care about anything else, because this is the KPI of the week. sometimes i wonder whose sanity suffers more from this shit, the front liners or the fucking managers

Some black techno for you this mornin ✌🏽👽