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Incident 386: Amazon’s "Time Off Task" System Made False Assumptions about Workers' Time Management

Description: Amazon’s warehouse worker “time off task" (TOT) tracking system was used to discipline and dismiss workers, falsely assuming workers to have wasted time and failing to account for breaks or equipment issues.

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Alleged: Amazon developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Amazon warehouse workers.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
386
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2019-07-03
Editors
Khoa Lam, Sean McGregor
Applied Taxonomies
MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified
Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

A further 23 subdomains create an accessible and understandable classification of hazards and harms associated with AI
 

5.2. Loss of human agency and autonomy

Risk Domain

The Domain Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies risks into seven AI risk domains: (1) Discrimination & toxicity, (2) Privacy & security, (3) Misinformation, (4) Malicious actors & misuse, (5) Human-computer interaction, (6) Socioeconomic & environmental harms, and (7) AI system safety, failures & limitations.
 
  1. Human-Computer Interaction

Entity

Which, if any, entity is presented as the main cause of the risk
 

AI

Timing

The stage in the AI lifecycle at which the risk is presented as occurring
 

Post-deployment

Intent

Whether the risk is presented as occurring as an expected or unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
 

Intentional

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Incident OccurrenceAmazon to roll out tools to monitor factory workers and machinesThe Amazon That Customers Don’t SeeInternal Documents Show Amazon’s Dystopian System for Tracking Workers Every Minute of Their Shifts
Amazon to roll out tools to monitor factory workers and machines

Amazon to roll out tools to monitor factory workers and machines

arstechnica.com

The Amazon That Customers Don’t See

The Amazon That Customers Don’t See

nytimes.com

Internal Documents Show Amazon’s Dystopian System for Tracking Workers Every Minute of Their Shifts

Internal Documents Show Amazon’s Dystopian System for Tracking Workers Every Minute of Their Shifts

vice.com

Amazon to roll out tools to monitor factory workers and machines
arstechnica.com · 2020

Amazon is rolling out cheap new tools that will allow factories everywhere to monitor their workers and machines, as the tech giant looks to boost its presence in the industrial sector.

Launched by Amazon’s cloud arm AWS, the new machine-le…

The Amazon That Customers Don’t See
nytimes.com · 2021

Last September, Ann Castillo saw an email from Amazon that made no sense. Her husband had worked for the company for five years, most recently at the supersize warehouse on Staten Island that served as the retailer’s critical pipeline to Ne…

Internal Documents Show Amazon’s Dystopian System for Tracking Workers Every Minute of Their Shifts
vice.com · 2022

Infamously, Amazon punishes and sometimes fires warehouse workers who it believes are wasting time at work. A new filing obtained by Motherboard gives detailed insight into how Amazon tracks and records every minute of "time off task" (whic…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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