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Feeling duped by Amazon's "magical AI" bullshit


Back in the Summer of 2019, I was in Seattle doing customer interviews for work, and I stopped by a friend's apartment in downtown Seattle. I spent a few hours there while using his wifi along with a spare desk. Nothing was too unusual until I went to buy a

It was a brightly lit, well-stocked convenience store with good brands and I looked for snack options, eventually grabbing an egg salad sandwich off a shelf but changed my mind and instead opted for some prosciutto-wrapped cheese sticks and a can of seltzer water. Strangely, that's what Amazon calls their own service that is powered off the backs of a virtual army of people completing anonymous small tasks who get paid pennies to click a button or answer a question hundreds of times a day. It was the only place where time was so much of the essence and I could recall instances where I had to put down items I wanted to buy while stuck in a long line in O'Hare because my phone buzzed to tell me boarding started so I had to run to a plane instead.

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