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
Kate Perkins, Khoa Lam, Sean McGregor

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.