ARTICLE 1 Should Robots Have a Face? Michael Corkery1 When Tina…

Question Answered step-by-step ARTICLE 1 Should Robots Have a Face? Michael Corkery1 When Tina… ARTICLE 1Should Robots Have a Face?Michael Corkery1When Tina Sorg first saw the robot rolling through her Giant supermarket inHarrisburg, Pa., she said to herself, “That thing is a little weird.”Programmed to detect spills and debris in the aisles, the robot looked like an inkjetprinter with a long neck.”It needed personality,” said Ms. Sorg, 55, who manages the store’s beer and winedepartment.So, during one overnight shift, she went out to a nearby arts and craft store, broughtback a large pair of googly eyes and, when no one was looking, affixed them on the top ofthe robot.The eyes were a hit with executives at the global grocery company Ahold Delhaize, whichowns the Giant and Stop & Shop supermarket chains. They are now a standard featureon the company’s nearly 500 robots across the United States.How this supermarket robot got its goofy eyes touches on a serious question: Will robotswith friendly faces and cute names help people feel good about devices that are takingover an increasing amount of human work?Robots are now working everywhere from factories to living rooms. But the introductionof robots to public settings like the grocery store is fueling new fears that humans arebeing pushed out of jobs. McKinsey, the consulting firm, says the grocers couldimmediately reduce “the pool of labor hours” by as much as 65 percent if they adoptedall the automation technology currently available.Michael Corkery 1© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANYThis article explores the roles that machines have taken on in retail stores, and theimpact of their physical presence on customers and workers.Text Pairing: Working with Robots”Margin pressure has made automation a requirement, not a choice,” McKinsey said in areport last year.Retailers said their robot designs were not explicitly meant to assuage angst about joblosses. Still, companies of all sizes — from Carrefour in Spain to Schnucks supermarketin St. Louis — are investing in tens of thousands of friendly-looking robots that arequickly upending human work.Most of the retail robots have just enough human qualities to make them appear benign,but not too many to suggest they are replacing humans entirely.”It’s like Mary Poppins,” said Peter Hancock, a professor at the University of CentralFlorida, who has studied the history of automation. “A spoonful of sugar makes therobots go down.”Perhaps no other retailer is dealing as intensely with the sensitivities around automationas Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, with about 1.5 million workers. Thecompany spent many months working with the firm Bossa Nova and researchers atCarnegie Mellon University to design a shelf-scanning robot that they hope bothemployees and customers will feel comfortable with.This robot was designed without a face, because its developers did not want customersto think they could interact with the device. But many of the robots have names, given tothem by store staff. Some also wear name badges.”We want the associates to have an attachment to it and want to protect it,” said SarjounSkaff, a co-founder and the chief technology officer at Bossa Nova. Walmart said itplanned to deploy the robots in 1,000 stores by the end of the year, up from about 350.At the Walmart Supercenter in Phillipsburg, N.J., on the Pennsylvania border,employees named the robot Wall-E — a choice partly inspired by the Pixar film thatdepicts a trash-collecting robot on a deserted planet.The robot can work 365 days a year, scanning shelves with high-resolution camerastabulating out-of-stock items. It takes a short break between shifts to recharge itsbatteries in a docking station.Text Pairing: Working with RobotsWall-E completes its route with no assistance from humans, except when it becomesstuck on the rug in the pharmacy section. When this happens, the store manager, TomMcGowan, gets an alert on his phone, sometimes in the middle of the night. He thencalls the store to tell someone to free the robot.Mr. McGowan said that he referred to Wall-E as a he but that other employees thoughtof the robot as a she.”I’ll say, ‘Where is he at?'” Mr. McGowan said. “But they say, ‘Where is she at?'”Retailers say the robots are good for their workers. They free up employees frommundane and sometimes injury-prone jobs like unloading delivery trucks to focus onmore fulfilling tasks like helping customers.At the Walmart Supercenter in Phillipsburg, some workers have put their personaltouches on automation that’s changing their jobs.The store’s newly installed FAST unloader automatically sorts boxes arriving at thestore, and reduced the number of workers needed to empty a delivery truck from eightto four. The task now takes employees about two-thirds the time it used to, springingthem from the often sweltering confines of the back room to spend time ferryinginventory out to the aisles and dealing with customers. Walmart says the new unloaderhas reduced turnover in the back room.The employees named the unloader Grover and placed a plush blue puppy on top of it asa kind of mascot.”It’s the way of the world,” said Lori Vogelin, who works in the back room inPhillipsburg.Automation has not yet reduced Walmart’s overall work force, but executivesacknowledge that the number of positions in the stores will eventually decline throughattrition. The company says it was retraining many of its employees to work in its e-commerce and health care businesses or even helping them prepare for jobs outsideWalmart.Text Pairing: Working with Robots”There is never going to be this great cataclysm of job loss,” Mr. Hancock, the Universityof Central Florida professor, said. “It is going to be death by a thousand cuts, or death bya thousand robots.”Throughout history, Mr. Hancock said, workers have attacked technologies when theyfeel threatened, like the 19th-century Luddites, who destroyed machinery in textilemills.”If you push too hard, too far, people transfer their anger to the technology and theyrevolt,” he said.Ms. Sorg, who has worked at Giant for 14 years, isn’t worried.At first, she was unsure how her bosses would react to the googly eyes. But the robot’sdevelopers at Badger Technologies loved them.A spokeswoman for Badger said one of the supermarket’s executives remarked thatrobot reminded him of an employee named Marty, who was “tall, thin, reserved and notvery emotional.” Since then, the robot has been known as Marty.While others might worry about robots taking jobs, Ms. Sorg said: “I haven’t put muchthought into it. I am just fascinated by the whole thing.” For Halloween, she dressed upas Marty to go trick or treating with her grandchildren.Last month, Stop & Shop celebrated Marty’s first anniversary with a series of parties atits stores around the Northeast.The company said the parties were partly a chance for Stop & Shop to explain tocustomers how robots are improving the cleanliness of its aisles.Marty is equipped with sensors that detect spills and then trigger an automatedannouncement over the store’s loudspeaker beckoning employees to clean up the mess.At the many “Marty Parties,” there were sheet cakes decorated with the robot’s signatureeyes and goody bags containing robots fashioned from juice boxes and applesaucecontainers.Text Pairing: Working with RobotsAn older customer in Newburgh, N.Y., brought the robot a can of WD-40 lubricant as agift. In Queens and on Long Island, children made cards, drew pictures and composedpoems for Marty.”Wishing you a Happy First Birthday,” one young customer wrote to the robot. “May youhave many more.”ARTICLE 2A.I. May Not Take Your Job, but It Could Become Your BossKevin Roose2When Conor Sprouls, a customer service representative in the call center of insurancegiant MetLife talks to a customer over the phone, he keeps one eye on the bottom-rightcorner of his screen. There, in a little blue box, A.I. tells him how he’s doing.Talking too fast? The program flashes an icon of a speedometer, indicating that heshould slow down.Sound sleepy? The software displays an “energy cue,” with a picture of a coffee cup.Not empathetic enough? A heart icon pops up.For decades, people have fearfully imagined armies of hyper-efficient robots invadingoffices and factories, gobbling up jobs once done by humans. But in all of the worryabout the potential of artificial intelligence to replace rank-and-file workers, we mayhave overlooked the possibility it will replace the bosses, too.Sprouls and the other call center workers at his office in Warwick, Rhode Island, stillhave plenty of human supervisors. But the software on their screens — made by Cogito,an A.I. company in Boston — has become a kind of adjunct manager, always watchingthem. At the end of every call, Sprouls’ Cogito notifications are tallied and added to astatistics dashboard that his supervisor can view. If he hides the Cogito window byminimizing it, the program notifies his supervisor.Cogito is one of several A.I. programs used in call centers and other workplaces. Thegoal, according to Joshua Feast, Cogito’s chief executive, is to make workers moreeffective by giving them real-time feedback.Kevin Roose 2© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANYThis article digs into the pros and cons of companies using artificial intelligence tosupervise and evaluate employees.Text Pairing: Working with Robots”There is variability in human performance,” Feast said. “We can infer from the waypeople are speaking with each other whether things are going well or not.”The goal of automation has always been efficiency, but in this new kind of workplace,A.I. sees humanity itself as the thing to be optimized. Amazon uses complex algorithmsto track worker productivity in its fulfillment centers, and can automatically generatethe paperwork to fire workers who don’t meet their targets, as The Verge uncovered thisyear. (Amazon has disputed that it fires workers without human input, saying thatmanagers can intervene in the process.) IBM has used Watson, its A.I. platform, duringemployee reviews to predict future performance and claims it has a 96% accuracy rate.Then there are the startups. Cogito, which works with large insurance companies likeMetLife and Humana as well as financial and retail firms, says it has 20,000 users.Percolata, a Silicon Valley company that counts Uniqlo and 7-Eleven among its clients,uses in-store sensors to calculate a “true productivity” score for each worker, and rankworkers from most to least productive.Management by algorithm is not a new concept. In the early 20th century, FrederickWinslow Taylor revolutionized the manufacturing world with his “scientificmanagement” theory, which tried to wring inefficiency out of factories by timing andmeasuring each aspect of a job. More recently, Uber, Lyft and other on-demandplatforms have made billions of dollars by outsourcing conventional tasks of humanresources — scheduling, payroll, performance reviews — to computers.But using A.I. to manage workers in conventional, 9-to-5 jobs has been morecontroversial. Critics have accused companies of using algorithms for managerial tasks,saying that automated systems can dehumanize and unfairly punish employees. Andwhile it’s clear why executives would want A.I. that can track everything their workersdo, it’s less clear why workers would.”It is surreal to think that any company could fire their own workers without any humaninvolvement,” Marc Perrone, the president of United Food and Commercial WorkersInternational Union, which represents food and retail workers, said in a statementabout Amazon in April.In the gig economy, management by algorithm has also been a source of tensionbetween workers and the platforms that connect them with customers. This year, driversfor Postmates, DoorDash and other on-demand delivery companies protested a methodText Pairing: Working with Robotsof calculating their pay, using an algorithm, that put customer tips toward guaranteedminimum wages — a practice that was nearly invisible to drivers, because of the way theplatform obscures the details of worker pay.Still, there is a creepy sci-fi vibe to a situation in which A.I. surveils human workers andtells them how to relate to other humans. And it is reminiscent of the “workplacegamification” trend that swept through corporate America a decade ago, whencompanies used psychological tricks borrowed from video games, like badges and leaderboards, to try to spur workers to perform better.Phil Libin, the chief executive of All Turtles, an A.I. startup studio in San Francisco,recoiled in horror when I told him about my call center visit.”That is a dystopian hellscape,” Libin said. “Why would anyone want to build this worldwhere you’re being judged by an opaque, black-box computer?”Defenders of workplace A.I. might argue that these systems are not meant to beoverbearing. Instead, they’re meant to make workers better by reminding them to thankthe customer, to empathize with the frustrated claimant on Line 1 or to avoid slackingoff on the job.The best argument for workplace A.I. may be situations in which human bias skewsdecision-making, such as hiring. Pymetrics, a New York startup, has made inroads in thecorporate hiring world by replacing the traditional résumé screening process with anA.I. program that uses a series of games to test for relevant skills. The algorithms arethen analyzed to make sure they are not creating biased hiring outcomes, or favoringone group over another.”We can tweak data and algorithms until we can remove the bias. We can’t do that witha human being,” said Frida Polli, Pymetrics’ chief executive.Using A.I. to correct for human biases is a good thing. But as more A.I. enters theworkplace, executives will have to resist the temptation to use it to tighten their grip ontheir workers and subject them to constant surveillance and analysis. If that happens, itwon’t be the robots staging an uprising.   Should Robots Have a Face?AI May Not Take Your Job, but It Could Become Your BossWhat is the text about overall?   Key Quotes: (select 1+)  What claims does it make? What sub-claims are made? What underlying assumptions does the text make? (They Say)  What do I think?  (I Say)    Imagine you were going to make a synthesis essay about this topic. make an outline using the Argument Structures we looked at in class. You don’t need to write down every word of your actual argument, just an outline. Get creative with your structure, and specify what evidence you would use to support your claims.  Social Science Sociology ENGLISH HONORS 2 Share QuestionEmailCopy link Comments (0)