Inside the Dystopia That Is Amazon

A lengthy Bloomberg article, “Fired by bot at Amazon: it’s you against the machine’”, provides a fascinating snapshot of a highly dystopian working environment where algorithms are used to manage people: the application that manages delivery drivers hired through Amazon Flex — a system created in 2015 that I referred to in 2017 as the uberisation of logistics — is responsible for sending dismissal emails that are often unclear as to the reason, or point to customer evaluations or simply the ups and downs of demand.

The article, based on extensive interviews with Amazon staff, explains how automation doesn’t always function as expected: decisions that would usually be carried out by a manager, a white collar position, are instead announced by an algorithm, while purely logistical work, traditionally considered blue collar, is still carried out by people. Amazon doesn’t understand such categories: it all comes down to resources, and if a task can be automated in a way that optimizes results, it is automated. While many companies shy away from the term human resources, given perceptions that people should not simply be considered as such, Amazon has instead decided to go about things based on scientific rationale, with results that are not bad from an economic point of view, but that leave something to be desired on a human level. Some recent articles about Amazon describe a people-crushing machine that consumers never see or hear about.

In many ways, an Amazon worker is a person waiting for the company to figure out how to automate their job. If you work as a picker in their warehouses, you do so in warehouses that have not been designed so that you can be replaced by the Kiva robots that drag shelves around, and that constitute an ever-growing army: in January of last year, there were more than 200,000 of them. If you perform other functions, you may be replaced by Ernie or Bert, their latest robotics developments — and that’s bearing in mind that their warehouses are by no means the most automated, compared to those of, say, JD.com in China. If you are in software development, a position that the company has traditionally nurtured, watch out: as soon as software development can be automated, the company will do so. If you are a manager, usually with a lot of retail and negotiation experience, who is dedicated to closing million-dollar contracts with brands that sell their products on Amazon’s platform, it’s likely your functions are already being developed by algorithms. Whenever we find a process traditionally carried out by people that can, thanks to the development of a particular technology, be done by an algorithm, it is very possible that Amazon has probably been experimenting with it for a while.

People managed by robots… how far should companies take their optimization processes now that more and more tasks can be automated? Is it normal for an algorithm to assign delivery routes in such a way that drivers are reduced to peeing in a bottle if they want to meet them? If your algorithms tell you that the optimal thing to do is to destroy tons of unsold merchandise that has not even made it out of its box, does it make sense to follow those orders blindly? If your customers struggle to evaluate a product, should an algorithm, and a bad one at that, reject those evaluations and insult them? What happens when all decisions are made by algorithms, with virtually no human intervention? Is this an exception, or is it the future?

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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