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.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: 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
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
Amazon is rolling out cheap new tools that will allow factories everywhere to monitor their workers and machines, as the tech giant looks to boost its presence in the industrial sector.
Launched by Amazon’s cloud arm AWS, the new machine-le…
Last September, Ann Castillo saw an email from Amazon that made no sense. Her husband had worked for the company for five years, most recently at the supersize warehouse on Staten Island that served as the retailer’s critical pipeline to Ne…
Infamously, Amazon punishes and sometimes fires warehouse workers who it believes are wasting time at work. A new filing obtained by Motherboard gives detailed insight into how Amazon tracks and records every minute of "time off task" (whic…
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.
