United States of Amazon: exposing horrible business practices & more

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Nvidia Wants to Replace Nurses With AI for $9 an Hour

Your health could soon be in the hands of Nvidia-powered AI nurses, and they cost your healthcare provider next to nothing.

gizmodo.com

Nvidia announced a collaboration with Hippocratic AI on Monday, a healthcare company that offers generative AI nurses who work for just $9 an hour. Hippocratic promotes how it can undercut real human nurses, who can cost $90 an hour, with its cheap AI agents that offer medical advice to patients over video calls in real-time.

“Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an age of abundance in healthcare, but only if the technology responds to patients as a human would,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of Healthcare at NVIDIA in a press release Monday.

Nvidia is powering Hippocratic’s real-time responses over video calls. In a demo posted by Nvidia, a semi-human-looking AI agent named Rachel verbally instructs a patient on how to take penicillin. The agent then tells the patient it will report back all this information to her real human doctor. Rachel is one of many AI nurses that healthcare providers can choose from, according to one of Hippocratic’s product pages. The AI nurses range in specialties from “Colonoscopy Screening” to “Breast Cancer Care Manager,” all for less than minimum wage.

Hippocratic directly promotes how it can undercut the living wages of real nurses as a feature, not a bug. One page of the company’s website compares a human nurse’s $90 per hour salary to an AI agent’s $9 an-hour running costs. Hippocratic claims its AI nurses outperform human nurses regarding bedside manner, education, and narrowly miss on satisfaction, according to a survey.

The introduction of AI healthcare agents comes at a tumultuous time for the nursing industry. Over 32,000 nurses went on strikes around the country in 2023, representing a quarter of all major strikes in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nurses are dealing with worker shortages, that predate the covid-19 pandemic, which Hippocratic seeks to address.

The Hippocratic collaboration was one of many announcements from Nvidia’s 2024 GTC Conference, but this AI development was perhaps the most dystopian. Hippocratic says its AI nurses were tested by thousands of human nurses and hundreds of human doctors. The company’s technology is being tested by over 40 healthcare providers around the country.

“With Generative AI, the incremental cost of healthcare access and interventions is trending to zero,” says Hippocratic on its About page. “LLMs are the only scalable way to close this gap,” referring to the difference in healthcare supply and demand.

The AI company working with Nvidia says its generative AI nurses are not sufficient to make diagnoses. The AI healthcare agent is trained to engage a human when appropriate. Hippocratic’s name is inspired by The Hippocratic Oath, a code of ethics that physicians adhere to that means to “first, do no harm.”

 

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Train Safety Fixed Forever: Miles-Long Freight Trains Now Require 2 Whole Crew Members

The new rule still allows for one-person train crews after a special approval process.

jalopnik.com

Freight railroads are using something called Precession Scheduling to run longer trains with fewer crewmembers in order to maximize profits. To hopefully curb potential accidents, the Biden Administration mandated Tuesday a bare minimum that at least two people be aboard sometimes miles-long freight trains. Some trains, however, will get a pass even on this bare bones basic safety requirement.


Dangerous derailments, especially the toxic chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio, prompted public scrutiny, but progress on new legislation has moved at a glacial pace. This new rule is the first proposed since 2022. In a statement from the Federal Railroad Administration, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said:

“Common sense tells us that large freight trains, some of which can be over three miles long, should have at least two crew members on board - and now there’s a federal regulation in place to ensure trains are safely staffed. This rule requiring safe train crew sizes is long overdue, and we are proud to deliver this change that will make workers, passengers, and communities safer.”
Now, I wouldn’t consider a train over a mile long with two crewmembers “safely staffed.” Continuing on from Buttigieg’s example, a crewmember is expected to walk six miles if a three-mile-long train is forced to stop due to an issue at the other end. During this lengthy hike, the train is stopped wherever it is for at least an hour. Yes, requiring a second crewmember is a marked improvement, but it barely reaches the bare minimum for safety. The railroad companies claim there’s no evidence that larger crews will make operations safer, but the smaller, less safe crews were one of the many complaints railroad workers brought to the table in 2021 when a nationwide freight strike loomed.


The new FRA rule doesn’t outright ban one-person crews. Existing single-handed operations, including hauling hazardous materials, can continue if they “do not pose significant safety risks to railroad employees, the public, or the environment.” The new rule also establishes an approval process for new one-person crew operations.

 

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Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores

Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.

gizmodo.com

Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores​

Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.​

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company’s senior vice president of grocery stores says they’re moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.


Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

Instead, Amazon is moving towards Dash Carts, a scanner and screen that’s embedded in your shopping cart, allowing you to checkout as you shop. These offer a more reliable solution than Just Walk Out. Amazon Fresh stores will also feature self check out counters from now on, for people who aren’t Amazon members.

“We’re rolling out Amazon Dash Cart, our smart-shopping carts,” said an Amazon spokesperson to Gizmodo. Amazon confirmed this feature is replacing its Just Walk Out technology in existing stores.

Just Walk Out was first introduced in 2016, presenting Amazon’s biggest and boldest innovation in grocery shopping. The technology seemed incredible, but there were some stumbles. It often took hours for customers to receive receipts after leaving the store, largely because offshore cashiers were rewatching videos and assigning items to different customers. The system of scanners and video cameras in each store is also incredibly expensive.

According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.

“The primary role of our Machine Learning data associates is to annotate video images, which is necessary for continuously improving the underlying machine learning model powering,” said an Amazon spokesperson to Gizmodo. However, the spokesperson acknowledged these associates validate “a small minority” of shopping visits when AI can’t determine a purchase.

Amazon Fresh, the e-commerce giant’s grocery store first launched in 2007, has just over 40 locations around the United States. The company also owns Whole Foods, and many of Amazon Fresh’s experiments are seen as precursors for the large chain.

The company is reportedly keeping Just Walk Out technology in a small number of Fresh stores in the United Kingdom, and some of its Amazon Go convenience stores. Amazon has also implemented Just Walk Out technology at several ballparks around the country. These locations will keep the technology going.


Amazon is trying to further break into the grocery space to grow into another billion-dollar market. Though it owns Whole Foods, the e-commerce giant still doesn’t compete with food goliaths like Walmart, Costco, and Kroger. Amazon’s push away from expensive tests like Just Walk Out may be a sign the company is looking to further expand its presence as a supermarket.

All the elitist people that were always saying "of course we don't need cashiers, its a worthless unskilled job & they dont deserve a living wage & AI thats better than them is already here for those jobs", a few years ago, are quiet now that they're walking back all this self checkout nonsense. Some of us already knew it was all smoke n mirrors so they didnt have to pay people.

 

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