Incident 125: Amazon’s Robotic Fulfillment Centers Have Higher Serious Injury Rates

Description: Amazon’s robotic fulfillment centers have higher serious injury rates.

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

Incident Stats

Incident ID
125
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2020-09-29
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

GMF Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Known AI Goal

Robotic Manipulation, Activity Tracking, Automatic Skill Assessment

Potential AI Technology

Visual Object Detection

Known AI Technical Failure

Tuning Issues

Potential AI Technical Failure

Lack of Capability Control

Amazon’s robotic fulfillment centers have higher serious injury rates
revealnews.org · 2020

Robots. Prime Day. Holiday peak. Internal records show Amazon has deceived the public on rising injury rates among its warehouse workers.

On Cyber Monday 2014, Amazon operations chief Dave Clark proudly unveiled the company’s new warehouse …

What are injury rates like at Amazon warehouses?
revealnews.org · 2020

Amazon’s warehouse injury rates have been secret for years despite mounting public concerns over labor practices and lack of worker safety. With access to a trove of new internal records, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting i…

California Passes Warehouse Worker Bill, Taking Aim at Amazon
wired.com · 2021

Warehouse workers in California are one step closer to being able to pee in peace. Yesterday, the state Senate voted 26 to 11 to pass AB 701, a bill aimed squarely at Amazon and other warehousing companies that track worker productivity. Th…

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.