This week has felt like a fast movie trailer showing what is now, ubiquitous scenes of machine-human iterations. This has been helped along by the fact that: a. I’ve had a lot of actual dreams at night, b. I’ve watched a lot of movie trailers this week – most of them including odd loops of technical work, c. I’ve also watched science fiction clips; because Digg is posting short science fiction films to its site almost daily and most of them have some robot presence, and d. last but not least, I read the news which includes something every day about Amazon.
In my recent essays involving Amazon, I’ve pointed out that the Amazon Echo (and all similar gadgets) as well as their service to allow them entrance to your home for delivery, is already a clear intrusion into your privacy, that is, if you even value that any more. Amazon has, of course, already transformed the marketplace, but that is coming with an increasingly dark edge, one that is starting to feel like one of those movie trailers I described. There is the highly publicized search for headquarters #2 (HQ2) which will cost some city their soul and their blood. There is frequent publicity about the distribution centers, the tightening work conditions, intolerance to any failure to keep up with higher, faster, and tighter performance standards. This week, a NYT article claims that Amazon will continuously track worker location and will even nudge your wrist with vibrations from a watch like device to direct your activities and motions. At what point does a worker simply become a meat robot?
Am I the only one that thinks a line is being crossed here? This is how it will go down; incrementally. I understand that all of those workers need that $12 an hour job so I’m not suggesting any specific action, but we do need to understand where this is going. To take our science-‘fiction’ movies to the next step, we can expect Amazon workers to be monitored and directed first by computer programs and then by AI. Those machines will also dictate hiring and firing, so managers, don’t get so smug yet. Eventually, the watch will be dispensed with in favor of cranial implants. The AI will then be in full and active control of human employee beings. Then the AI will also have access to the same employees at home via the home wifi connection; remember, Amazon already has access to customers front door, so this is a minor expansion. Said humans can now be summoned to come to work, are directed at home and work by AI, perhaps they are also now fed by Amazons growing food supply chain. At this point, an Amazon ‘employee’ is now an Amazon robot, functioning in an almost total Amazon platform; all for $12 an hour or whatever the minimum wage becomes in your town.
A huge complication with this almost inevitable evolution is that at face value, Amazon is what retail must become. It’s a great service, its efficient and basically far better than most of the competition as a distribution system. It has also revolutionized prospects for many product suppliers. The two faces of Amazon will become increasingly irreconcilable. Imagine a world populated by two camps, the consumerist that use and enjoy Amazon or similar services and the human-robot slaves that have been internally hijacked for corporate and consumer benefit. The only humane objective at that point will be to finish the robot-ization to where no human workers are needed at all. Where will those workers go? Frankly, that shouldn’t be Amazons problem, and anything, including a universal wage should be regarded as a necessity above supplanting a human to a machine’s will. That is a problem for the next Bezos.
Commentary by Lee Jones