They found a way to outsource grocery store employees. great
Yeah this has been my biggest takeaway actually from this story circulating.
The rich and business owners have now found a way to export even basic service jobs to cheaper countries to mostly save themselves the money and reap the profits.
I’m a pretty far leftist but holy moly we really need to stop selling every job to cheap laborers because it’s only enriching those who already have enough and seems to do little good for anyone else.
I dont think “not wanting to outsource to the cheapest labour pool” is a hallmark of the left or the right wing.
I think “not wanting to outsource” is both progressive and anti-capitalist.Doing things as cheap as possible, no matter who suffers, is absolutely a capitalist thing, and is why government regulation and government oversight is so important… As long as the government isnt in on it, of course (thats just a corrupt government)
I dont think “not wanting to outsource to the cheapest labour pool” is a hallmark of the left or the right wing.
Exactly. At least here in the US, both ruling parties are 100% capitalist and exist to enrich the wealthy to an even more obscene degree than they already do.
It’s why when they ask for political donations I put that money in stocks instead.
That’s not the point at all. They wanted to automate this with computers and it failed. They had to rely on workers in India to do the analysis. That’s why they’re canceling this service.
But AI is intelligent and sentient, just throw more server farms at the problem, right?
/s
I knew it!
I thought it was China.
I’m not exactly sure how they would have set this up given that their usual solution of Mechanical Turk does not pay their workers in cash anywhere outside of the US.
In some rural parts of the states Mechanical Turk is the largest employer but workers in other countries can only get paid in Amazon vouchers.
Somehow there are still a lot of Indian people working for Mechanical Turk though. It’s not clear if they are exchanging the vouchers or are stuck in a hellish walled garden where their wages can only be spent with their employer.
Isn’t that like, company scrip. I thought that was meant to be illegal.
It is, but Uncle Sam can’t do anything about how you “pay” your “workforce” in other countries.
I mean, they actually can, but then corporate lobbying groups will be sad, so Congress wont do anything about it.
What ever happened to doing this with UHF RFID? Getting the cost of the individual chips down was always just a matter of scaling production.
Jesus christ these headlines mislead everything.
They were using machine learning to try and figure out what people were buying. Machine learning has lots of errors until you train it. The “hundreds of workers” were training it by telling it what each thing was. E.g. it was creating training data for it to learn from.
The goal was to train ML enough so that humans were rarely necessary, obviously.
That’s their excuse but it is convenient for them that in order to train the AI the workers need to follow the exact same steps as what an AI would be doing if it was sufficiently trained. We can’t say as outsiders to what extent the actual work is assisted by AI. Seems likely that it is largely a manual process.
I understand the spirit, but that’s how it goes. You have somebody doing the work, as you want the ML to do it, and then feed the data. It’s the same when they get oncology scans that have been diagnosed by well paid doctors, somebody who knows does and the machine tries to replicate.
What very likely happened is that the failure rate platoed much higher than they expected, and all this time the goal was to lower it. Remember, it’s cheaper to have 0 people in India than 1, specially with AWS in mind.
Moreover, even if the accuracy was incredibly high, they would still need people reviewing. You have to review random events to ensure the model keeps performing well and to evaluate the ones with low confidence or suspicious.
My goal is to build a fusion reactor.
I will hire Indian call center workers to add fuel to my diesel generator until the fusion is up and running.
This plan makes sense to certain people on the internet.
You could probably get lots of funding with this. I say go for it.
