At the end of our driveway sits a green box. I built it a few years ago for deliveries from Amazon, UPS, FedEx, and other delivery companies. Our neighbors up the hill asked if they could have their packages delivered there as well, since their house is difficult if not impossible to get to without a four wheel drive vehicle. I added their number to the front of the box, and the companies have been pretty good about bringing packages up our shared gravel road to the box instead of leaving them by the side of the paved road.
A month or so ago Amazon opened a warehouse where the old East Towne Mall used to be, and we started seeing Amazon delivery vehicles in our area. A few days ago our dogs started barking furiously and I got to the front window in time to see someone walking back down the long hill; when I checked the green box there were two packages from Amazon. Now that’s a dedicated employee, I thought. As it turns out, maybe not. Maybe they had no choice.
Earlier today the dogs alerted me to a white van parked next to the box with its flashers on. When I walked down to see what the problem was, the young woman in the passenger seat said that they had an Amazon delivery for our neighbors up on the mountain and, even though their number was on the front of our box, Amazon wouldn’t clear them to go on to their next delivery because the company’s tracking GPS did not show them at our neighbor’s house. The one they couldn’t get to with the vehicle they had. It took a call to the routing center and a picture of the green box with both numbers on it for the center to reprogram the tracking system to allow them to put the package in our box and go on with their day.
This is, I think, an example of a highly efficient system that allows the company to know exactly where their employees are and how long they spend at each stop, and works like a charm as long as nothing unexpected happens. Then everything stops and, at least for the driver (who is actually doing the delivery work) it is impossible to make a decision based on the new information and do what is necessary to continue doing their job. Human intervention on a managerial level is needed.
I recently read in a blog by a marketing expert the suggestion that workers should teach AI to do their job for them. If they don’t, he explained, the worker’s boss will. His argument was that we should turn over to AI the things it can do as well or better than humans and use the new freedom to concentrate on the things it can’t do.
Amazon (and, I’m certain, most other companies like them) has a system that allows supervision of front line workers by an automated system that can’t think on its feet. By definition it can perform tasks automatically. This suggests that companies like Amazon who use this kind of system could, and probably should, use the brains, experience, and time of their human staff to figure out the best way for humans to retake control smoothly when the automatic approach doesn’t work.