{"id":178711,"date":"2018-09-11T20:35:00","date_gmt":"2018-09-12T01:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/09\/11\/amazon-is-evil-part-many\/"},"modified":"2018-09-11T20:35:00","modified_gmt":"2018-09-12T01:35:00","slug":"amazon-is-evil-part-many","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/09\/11\/amazon-is-evil-part-many\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon is Evil, Part Many"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Amazon applied for a patent that would literally put its workers in cages<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Following a mild media sh%$ storm, they are now saying that this was, “A bad idea,” and that they would never do this.<\/p>\n

Yeah, right:<\/p>\n

No one ever said working at Amazon was a relaxed experience. The e-commerce giant is well known for its taxing workplace culture, but putting warehouse workers in cages seems a bit extreme, even for Amazon.<\/span>

<\/span> But a patent, granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to Amazon in 2016, would make that dystopian cubicle a reality. The patent shows a cage built for a human working in robot work zones, a small work station atop a robot trolley like the kind already used in Amazon warehouses to move shelving. The patent was highlighted in a study<\/a> by two artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, New York University distinguished research professor Kate Crawford<\/a> and director of the research lab Share Foundation<\/a> Vladan Joler. In their analysis, Crawford and Joler noted \u201can extraordinary illustration of worker alienation, a stark moment in the relationship between humans and machines.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span> When the study was reported by news outlets including The Seattle Times<\/i><\/a>, there was (predictable) blowback on social media. Amazon<\/a> senior vice president of operations Dave Clark even weighed in on Twitter<\/a>, explaining that even \u201cbad\u201d ideas are submitted for patents, and that the company has no plans to implement the cages.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, right.<\/p>\n

They are saying, “Never,” but I am hearing, “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amazon applied for a patent that would literally put its workers in cages. Following a mild media sh%$ storm, they are now saying that this was, “A bad idea,” and that they would never do this. Yeah, right: No one ever said working at Amazon was a relaxed experience. The e-commerce giant is well known …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,368,450,364,428,429],"class_list":["post-178711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-corruption","tag-employment","tag-evil","tag-ip","tag-patent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178711"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}