I was in a discussion today where people who worked for a retail business were discussing risks in their workplace. One refrain was employees didn’t feel supported by their employer, but also felt pressure to continue to come to work despite feeling unsafe because their work was considered to be “essential” because the business supplied “essential goods.”
One noted that the business didn’t have any definition of “essential,” and that day had packed and shipped, among other things, hair straighteners, ping pong balls, and other goods that didn’t have an obvious connection to survival-critical supplies.
And what can we say is essential? I have a long-haired dog we usually have groomed. This week I purchased hair-cutting scissors for close facial work on the poop machine, as well as cutting and thinning dog shears, and brushes to remove and clear mats from her undercoat, plus dog nail clippers.
They weren’t all available from a single reasonably local pet store, so I would have had to travel to three different places if I went that route. Seemed more of a risk than just buying all 4 things from Amazon, from my perspective, so I did. 24 hours later, I talked to someone who felt like it was a life or death choice as to whether to show up to work at a similar place, so that someone like me can get stuff like I bought.
The dog can’t see because her long hair has grown into her eyes, and our cheap scissors stolen from the office aren’t good enough to cut hair in one snip. Risking pulling her hair and her pulling away, I might actually cut my poor dog trying to just use whatever’s laying around. Worse, her nails are dragging as she walks, and they can split, then get infected, and then I’m bringing a doggie to the ER.
If I were a retail or online store employee, I might think I’m ridiculous and my purchase was frivolous.
In speech our need to put a single interpretation on something (or perhaps 2, if we’re using an n-best strategy and reevaluating disconfirmations) makes it difficult to account for points of view. On the other hand, it makes the traceability of a decision possible, because you can determine a threshold or logic point that makes the decision possible.
(let’s assume for now we’re not talking about abstract machine learning projects and wild adversarial networks doing stuff. We’re talking about commercial speech recognition here)
When we build the system, we can understand why the it understood what it did, and change it, or more likely, change the response. We don’t need to take an employee’s temperature and then make an error-prone, manual decision to decide whether they’re okay. Or mention the hair in the dog’s eyes as a sympathetic appeal. We couldn’t even if we wanted to!
When it comes to a country of laws making emergency measure and proclamations, that’s another thing. States’ rights and worker’s rights and dog haircuts, that’s on youse, Americans.