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Why is it ethical to terminate bad employees when a human determines said employee is bad, but unethical if software makes the determination? Ethnic bias would

by sadris 7y ago

Why is it ethical to terminate bad employees when a human determines said employee is bad, but unethical if software makes the determination? Ethnic bias would be eliminated in the latter case.

rasz 7y ago
If break[employee] > 1 minute employees[employee] = "bad employee"
empath75 7y ago
Depending on what information you’re using, you can easily accidentally code ethnic or other biases into the system.
- burger_moon 7y ago
  Amazon corporate offices have inter-faith prayer rooms and mothers rooms. I have a feeling they don't offer these basic amenities to hourly employees. Given the fact that warehouse employees are pissing in gatorade bottles because they don't have time to use a bathroom I would suspect that participating in a religion that requires stopping work to prayer mid-shift or stopping to go breast feed would cause their quotas to drop. So it's already pretty clear there's a huge bias towards only certain types of people who can even operate successfully in their warehouse as opposed to their corporate offices. Although I guess it's all by design, reading through comments here or anywhere on HN about worker mistreatment outside of high earning tech salaries and you can see how little empathy exists among many people here. These are the people Amazon wants and needs working for them.
- sadris 7y ago
  I'm not sure how you could have bias in a system that literally just measures packages moved per second.
dx034 7y ago
Because a human would at least consider if a termination is warranted. Humans make mistakes but by my experience, software tends to produce wrong results more often than humans. Therefore, for all important decisions it makes sense to always have human making the ultimate decision and consider if there is no prospect of performance improving. And even if the human doesn't do a better job, it's still the nicer way to be told by a person rather than a machine that you lost your job.

by sadris 7y ago

Why is it ethical to terminate bad employees when a human determines said employee is bad, but unethical if software makes the determination? Ethnic bias would be eliminated in the latter case.

rasz 7y ago

If break[employee] > 1 minute employees[employee] = "bad employee"

empath75 7y ago

Depending on what information you’re using, you can easily accidentally code ethnic or other biases into the system.

burger_moon 7y ago
Amazon corporate offices have inter-faith prayer rooms and mothers rooms. I have a feeling they don't offer these basic amenities to hourly employees. Given the fact that warehouse employees are pissing in gatorade bottles because they don't have time to use a bathroom I would suspect that participating in a religion that requires stopping work to prayer mid-shift or stopping to go breast feed would cause their quotas to drop. So it's already pretty clear there's a huge bias towards only certain types of people who can even operate successfully in their warehouse as opposed to their corporate offices. Although I guess it's all by design, reading through comments here or anywhere on HN about worker mistreatment outside of high earning tech salaries and you can see how little empathy exists among many people here. These are the people Amazon wants and needs working for them.
sadris 7y ago
I'm not sure how you could have bias in a system that literally just measures packages moved per second.

dx034 7y ago

Because a human would at least consider if a termination is warranted. Humans make mistakes but by my experience, software tends to produce wrong results more often than humans. Therefore, for all important decisions it makes sense to always have human making the ultimate decision and consider if there is no prospect of performance improving. And even if the human doesn't do a better job, it's still the nicer way to be told by a person rather than a machine that you lost your job.