Rebecca Ackermann

@rebackermann.bsky.social

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Writing about art, culture & tech for MIT Tech Review, Vox, Esquire & more | I have eclectic interests

The rapid proliferation of AI in our lives introduces new challenges around authorship, authenticity, and ethics i. Work and art. How can we make sense of these machines, not just use them?
Yet this line of thinking is hardly unique to Amazon, although the company could be seen as a pioneer in the datafication of work. (An investigation found that over one year between 2017 and 2018, the company fired hundreds of workers at a single facility—by means of automatically generated letters—for not meeting productivity quotas.)
But the report goes on to reveal that in 2022, another team at Amazon, called Core AI, also evaluated warehouse safety and concluded that unrealistic pacing wasn’t the reason all those workers were getting hurt on the job. Core AI said that the cause, instead, was workers’ “frailty” and “intrinsic likelihood of injury.” The issue was the limitations of the human bodies the company was measuring, not the pressures it was subjecting those bodies to. Amazon stood by this reasoning during the congressional investigation.